“Nobson Central” and “Welcome to Nobson”, a microcosmos created by…

It was therefore decided to erect a civic monument on the roundabout at the outskirts of town. The monument is a large, vertical structure that spells out the friendly message “Welcome to Nobson.”
—Paul Noble

Paul Noble is one of those artists who are able to create vast imaginary worlds, indulging laboriously in the smallest detail. Its penultimate work in the fifteen-year project, Welcome to Nobson (2008-10), whose main method of representation is cavalier projection, represents the last stage of great pictorial and textual narratives dedicated to an invented town, a memory of Calvino’s Invisible Cities.

From the Gagosian Gallery press release of the exhibition:

“Noble’s intricate graphite drawings describe Nobson Newtown, a place composed of labyrinthine edifices and deserted topography embedded with modules of dense detail. Employing cavalier projection—a cartographical method characterized by a high viewpoint—Noble meticulously delineates a wealth of elaborate architecture and open urban spaces. These phantasmagorical landscapes allude to sources as diverse as ancient Chinese scrolls, Fabergé eggs, Henry Moore’s sculptures, and paintings by Hieronymus Bosch. The encrypted fictions of Nobson Newtown are dizzyingly complex—visual articulations of the tensions between disorder, perversion, and logical schema.”

Further reading:
Paul Noble: Welcome to Nobson, Gagosian gallery on the arts desk
Life in Noble excremental city / a review by Adrian Searle on the Guardian
Nobson Central, on Il Giornale Nuovo

Via: Things Magazine, whom we want to thank for including Socks on the permanent blogroll!

Nobson Central

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