Selected Works by Lithuanian Artist Tadao Cern.

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Black Balloons (2016).

Lithuanian born artist Tadao Cern is inspired by everyday objects and occurrences. Curious to the core, Cern creates seemingly simple artworks that explore his insatiable fascination with the ordinary. Cern is a trained architect and worked as a sole practitioner before transitioning to photography and then visual arts. Architecture never felt like the ideal path for Cern who explains that he “needed more creative freedom that wouldn’t be limited by any regulations or clients.”

Since then he has worked with many different mediums including photography, painting and installations. In 2013 he garnered international attention with his “Blow Job” series (not what you think!) and again with a series depicting sunbathers in “Comfort Zone”. More recently he has stepped out of his comfort zone with an exploration into more conceptual expressions with “Black Balloons”, “Chromatic Aberrations” and “Hanging Paintings”.

Black Balloons II (Big Scale) (2017).

“Black Balloons” was born from the experimentation of materials and the physical relationship between objects. According to Cern, the series examines “unanticipated connections and contradictions highlighting an uncertain equilibrium, fragile and ephemeral.” The installation is conceived in various formats but earlier incarnations involved filling two regular latex balloons with two different gasses: helium and sulphur hexafluoride – one making the object lighter and the other heavier. He eventually worked out a way to make the balloons float in the middle of a glass tank without connecting them to anything and thus the compositions grew in size and complexity.

Recently, Cern installed his balloons on a New York landmark with the tongue in cheek title: “Plastic on Plastic.” “I couldn’t help myself from thinking to put Black Balloons on one of the most beautiful and iconic buildings in New York – New Museum designed by SANAA. So I did! I climbed on it last night and installed the piece. Then Dean Kaufman took a picture of it during the sunrise.”

Chromatic Aberrations (2016).

“Chromatic Aberration” delves into Cern’s interest in minimalism and patterns as well as impermanence and imperfection. A celebration of flaws, this two-dimensional series creates a failure to focus and questions our obsession with faultlessness. “I took colour pencils, drew something very simple on a piece of paper, took a photo of it and saw an amazing effect reveal on my phone screen. Out of that excitement I bought ten big canvases the same day, brought them to my studio and started experimenting. I spent a week only testing different painting mediums until I created my own, perfect for that specific purpose – make an even and perfectly executed imperfection.” The process for these paintings was laborious one and each piece took around 3 to 4 months to complete. There could be up to 18 different oil paint layers and he hand cut over 2,000 stencils to get the right patterns.

Hanging Paintings (2017).

Inspired by fabric and their endless combination of folds and creases, Cern created the series “Hanging Paintings.” The artworks have little to do with conventional painting and are rather compositions of fabric that have been arranged, draped and folded around a simple metal rack which serves as a canvas. Through this series, Cern explores childhood memories and our universal desire to get dressed up. “Every single piece that I did for this series felt like a revelation to me and I keep doing them over and over again,” says Cern. “What I love about them the most is they are absolutely good-for-nothing objects and nobody ever wore them and nobody ever will.”

Cern’s art is about the distillation of ideas and it reinforces the power of simplicity. Each series is a clean interpretation of ideas that are the result of working in a very systematic and rational way. This way of working and thinking is no doubt influenced by his architectural past. “As an architect you are very closely related to human anthropological behaviour and habits – you work around them, with them or try to change them. And now as an artist I have the same field of interest – I question what affects human actions in a certain way and can those things be changed.”

For now, Cern will continue to test and experiment with ideas and we can’t wait to see what’s next!

[Images courtesy of Tadao Cern.]

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