DESMOND LAZARO
POINT AND LINE TO PLANE

Art Gallery of New South Wales
4 November - 10 March 2024

Desmond Lazaro’s project Point and Line to Plane takes its title from a book by Vasily Kandinsky (1866–1944), one of the most influential of European modernists. In that book, Kandinsky said, ‘everything starts with a point’. From a point comes a line; from a line comes a plane, from a plane comes a solid form. From there, the universe unfolds.

For Lazaro, geometry is not only about simple lines and shapes; it is the crystalline structure of nature. Geometry, he says, is in everything – from the form of flowers and the way they grow, to stars and planets and people … we are all made of the same stuff! Like Kandinsky, Lazaro is interested in linking art, science and the spirit. He takes us on a journey into the deeper truths of geometry and the material mysteries of colour. He explores our fundamental relationship with the cosmos through ‘sacred geometries’ – the hidden meaning of shapes – probing the laws of art and nature to consider their mysteries.

Lazaro was commissioned by the Art Gallery of New South Wales to create a space within the major exhibition Kandinsky with a focus on families and children. This is a place for visitors of all ages to think, marvel and create. They can walk a labyrinth created by Lazaro based on the one at Chartres Cathedral in France, make their own art by using the basic shapes of geometry to form a DIY spirograph, and explore the wild and wonderful colours and patterns of our universe.