Pugin’s Revival Typologies • Emblem • Script • Lineage recorded • Chromatic discipline • Spatial rules defined
Multiplicity Distilled: Legacy Through Abstraction
Reimagining Pugin's Legacy through a dual act of modernity. We manipulate colour and treat 3D dimensional space within the confines of 2D design to transform 19th-century moral ornament into a 21st-century symbolic vernacular.
A Conceptual Rebirth
A new Renaissance of Resonance
Rooted in the prophetic gravitas of Augustus Pugin’s designs, this project executes a conceptual gesture that reimagines legacy through modern intervention. The abstraction does not lie within the images themselves, which retain their sublime precision and ornate beauty. It resides in the conscious elevation of these elements as symbolic and structural forces.
Historic grammar, present utility
Pugin’s Typologies
One Simple Abstraction propels this legacy beyond conservation and into creation. It serves as a philosophical instrument, a method of distillation. Each element is grounded in historical truth, however we refract that truth through the lens of contemporary insight. This is not looking back for answers but reaching into history for tools, symbols, and textures we can use now. Think of it less as a conclusion and more as a catalyst: something that recharges old meanings with new energy.
Sources
Pugin’s Glossary of Ecclesiastical Ornament and Costume, The Minton Tiles of the Palace of Westminster, Pugin’s Designs for Gold and Silversmiths, the Illustrations of Floriated Ornament and Pugin’s Furniture Designs.
Documentation
Each A3 print comes with an A4 Certificate of Provenance and a seal of Authenticity.
What is the intended impact of this new symbolic vernacular?
Our sense of self is never isolated but continually negotiated within the abstractions that institutions and mass media project. This body of work opens a space that is not only visual but conceptual, inviting reflection on how we understand ourselves and how layered collective frameworks co-author meaning. Abstraction here is both clarity and proliferation, a seed that distils essence while generating new architectures of form. It asks whether the aesthetic language of yesterday might still be speaking to what is coming next. One Simple Abstraction stands as a conceptual paraphrase, deliberately open to interpretation, bridging chromatic philosophy with legacy transformation in a way not previously articulated.
“Meaning is never solitary; it is layered, co-authored by institutions, mass media, and ourselves.”
CURATORIAL INTERPRETATION
By foregrounding layered co-authorship, the work acknowledges postmodern multiplicity yet resists its relativism. Instead, it distils these voices into abstraction as a generative anchor, opening a dialogic space where legacy and contemporary communication converge. One Simple Abstraction Theory (OSAT) signals an emergent departure from Postmodernism and advances a Neo Modernistic approach that transforms multiplicity into continuity, resonance and legacy. This framework underpins our collections that honour historical devotion while opening new channels of civic resonance.
“Abstractism beyond Personal Relativism.”