“We must arrive at a dynamic conception of forms, we must face the fact that all human forms are in a constant state of transformation,” Asger Jorn wrote in 1954. “Architecture is always the ultimate achievement of intellectual and artistic evolution. It is the final point in the achievement of any artistic endeavour because the creation of architecture implies the construction of an environment and the establishment of a way of life.”

Few artists have devoted as much energy as Nino Mustica to this sort of research into the evolving power of transformations. Though his roots are solidly within painting — and, if you had to choose one aspect, within the emotive impact of colour — Mustica’s natural sensibility is one of constant change, constant growth, constant evolution. He is a painter, but without the limitations of canvas or delineations between sign, gesture, colour, material — or vol- ume.

In 1994 Mustica began his research into three-dimensional pictorial forms, paintings with the memory of sculpture, paintings which travel through the space normally occupied by sculpture but nevertheless maintain their pictorial essence — for Mustica, colour is emo- tion, emotion is colour, colour is volume, and emotion-driven volume is transmuted into grand flexuous shapes of colours suddenly freed to display their entire range of possibility.

The mechanism for this freedom was technology: plexiglass, resin, digital patterning. In Musti- ca’s words, “Technology can realize only that which is possible. Not more, not less. It is born in the space between reality and thought.” He embraces technology because it empowers the artist, pulling together the core human emotions manifest in basic colour relations with cutting-edge advances in man’s engineering and mechanical prowess. For Mustica, these are not antithetical poles — they are simply possibilities, relationships, perhaps evidence of the interconnectedness of everything.

He sees a bee as an expert engineer and a spider as a master of mechanics. The rest is evolution.

Two years ago, technology led Mustica into partnership with Stefano Grandi, Europe’s lead- ing manufacturer of advanced linear motors. Together they designed, invented and patented new technology for roto-translating modular totems — adding the element of time to create a fourth dimension of painting — in infinite, unlimited combinations of colours, forms and solids.

From modular totems, it was a small step to Jorn’s “ultimate achievement of intellectual and artistic evolution” — architecture — but architecture that takes a further step, beyond Jorn, by working fluidly in four dimensions. In mechanics, translation is defined as the “motion of a body in which every point of the body moves parallel to and the same distance as every other point of the body.” It is uniform movement without rotation. Now imagine a skyscraper where each floor shifts continuously, translates, North to South, East to West, while at the same time rotating so that from your living room you can see both sunrise and sunset. That’s roto-translation, Mustica’s radically new living architecture, where the skyline shifts continuously — different skyline, different perspective, different way of looking, differ- ent lifestyle, new possibilities. Who lives in boxes, thinks in boxes. Who lives in fluidity, opens himself to new ways of life.

Mustica’s paintings have traversed sculpture, traversed architecture — they’ve taken on third and fourth dimensions — but the specific visual rhythms remain driven by the emotions of the colours. This ability to adapt core visual principles, beauty, to the environmental context — simplicity within complexity and complexity within simplicity, while rejecting limitations that lack substantive meaning — surfaces distinctly in his installation at Gaya Art Space in Bali.

The skyline of Bali is not physical. It is built out of ritual, religion, and tradition — whereas in the West art released man from his spirituality, or at least from what Joseph Campbell called man’s “mythic seizures,” in Bali spirituality has never been separated from art or any other aspect of life. And true to his ethos of “evolving,” Mustica’s paintings here traverse and adapt to religion and ritual in much the same way that his earlier paintings traversed and adapted to the third and fourth dimensions.

Although the overall creation is a wholly new entity, every detail of Mustica’s installation — like every detail of Balinese day-to-day life — is filled with religious and traditional significance. Eleven six-meter totems for the nine aspects of God, with two more for the Earth and Emp- tiness, each made of 33 layers for the 33 million gods present in the Hindu Vedas, made of glass (transparency), water (life), bamboo (flexibility), wood (groundedness), flowers (scent), textiles (colour), iron (strength), white ceramics (completeness), versicoloured ce- ramics (diversity), coconut leaf (nature), and stone (memory of the earth).

The paintings Mustica exhibits inside the gallery also take on Balinese influences, colours and patterns. These are paintings he could never have made in Milan. For Mustica, every body of work is a new symbology, a new expressivity — whether his work is a two-dimensional paint- ing, a four-dimensional shifting skyscraper, or a trans-physical totem, Mustica’s expressivity stays in the space between colour and emotion. Every environment, every country and culture and situation has a different colour. “Because,” he explains, “colours are the mean- ing of life.”

 Alexander Boldizar