Fictitious Tel Aviv

Architizer News

Fictitious Tel Aviv

July 11, 2011

Briefly noted: “My artistic career began at the age of 10, designing unreal cities, with all their streets (and their street names), their buildings, their topography, their bus and subway lines,” says artist and visualizer Victor Enrich, explaining his architectural fictions.

Enrich’s work lies somewhere between rendering and illustration, awash in a heavy dose of magical realism. The images have the quality of documents brought back from a parallel universe as “proof” of its existence. According to Enrich, that alternate reality might actually be America: the Israeli-based artist writes that, “Among all the real cities analyzed, special mention goes to the American city, which plays a key role in my imagination because of the size and exoticism of their buildings and streets, and the huge presence of motorized routes of some magnitude. American TV series of the 80s became an important source of imaging.”

A better way to describe Enrich’s work, then, might be to say that it re-imagines the urban subject (in this case, Tel Aviv’s International Style downtown) through the lens of American absurdism. Go peep the rest of his stuff over here. Also, his Architizer profile is here.