COVIMETRY Art Project

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COVIMETRY is a global work of art, defined by the curator and understood by the participants as the tension created by the collective effort of many people, making up a system pulsating with its own life.

COVIMETRY is also a global manifestation of various trends in geometric art, aware of its time.

The name COVIMETRY comes from the combination of two words: COVID (Corona Virus Desease) and GEOMETRY (any trend in geometric art: constructivist, hard edge, minimal art, op-art, concrete art, non-objective art, discursive geometry and others).

About 300 artists from over 40 countries in Europe, North and South America, Asia and Australia take part in the project. The number of participants and countries continues to grow.

The starting theme of all the work is an anti-virus mask template. The presented works have been realized in various techniques and technologies, such as: drawing, painting, graphics, collage, object, photography, mix media, computer animation, video.

Participation in the COVIMETRY project gave the artists the opportunity to use any artistic strategies proposed by the curator. Those are:

1. Mask as passe-partout, where the previously prepared image is placed on the mask as the background.
2. Mask as a canvas. The artistic work has been specially prepared for the shape of the mask, in accordance with the historical tradition of the frame law and the contemporary art of the shaped canvas.
3. Mask as a fragment. Part of the image has been cropped by the shape of the mask.
4. Mask as inspiration. Works based on tautology or the study of the shape and structure of the mask.
5. Mask as an excuse. Interdiscursive, multimedia, intermedia and transmedia art open to various experiments.
6. Mask as animation, video, monitor, screen.
7. Outside the mask. Other implementations with the possibility of using the shape of the mask. All media, techniques and technologies.

In the history of civilization, the use of masks begins at least 7,000 BC, in Neolithic rituals, although the so-called The "Mask of La Roche-Cotard" can shift these practices as far as 33,000 BC. Over the centuries, the mask, as an object worn on the face, has had many meanings and has undergone many metamorphoses. Nowadays, the transformation of the mask as an idea and artifact takes place under the influence of current cultural practices and various forms of social communication. As a result, the mask becomes included in discourses in which it has never appeared before. One of them is the discourse of the mask as a carrier of a work of art, which was initiated in the COVIMETRY project. Based on the Spanish expression "más que la cara" (more than a face), the masks presented at the COVIMETRY exhibition become a presentation of various artistic attitudes and their deep meanings.

Not without significance there is also the fact that mask in this project it is more of an idea than a physical artifact. The project is aimed at a wide range of visual and multimedia artists, designers, architects and all those whose art is still alive with the tradition of geometric art and its changing contexts. Therefore, the end result, which is a work of art and its exhibition, should be perceived here as a kind of a very broad, global and democratic manifestation of various attitudes of geometric contemporary art, based on a conceptual and interdiscursive basis.

                                                                                                           Mark Starel

Additional information:

The originator of the COVIMETRY project is Mark Starel, who started working on it in March 2020.

• The first exhibition took place in December 2020 at the BWA Gallery, Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski, Poland. 232 participants from 36 countries took part in it.
• The current exhibition: The Ely Center of Contemporary Art, 51 Trumbull St, New Haven, CT 06510, United States; April 19 - June 6, 2021; 302 participants from 44 countries.