Plate-form, a sculpture by Alexander David on the Darling Foundry’s public square, fits somewhere between furniture and architecture. Plate-form deals with man’s mobility, the interactivity he generates, even as it affords the pleasure of experiencing a raw mass, a wooden monolith open to urban life. A “formless” sculpture, malleable, open to new design, a kind of urban kit using plane geometry, Plate-form belongs to “an experiment in rhythm rather than in a desire to find an ideal form”, according to the artist. It invites visitors to appropriate “this place that takes shape from the use of an object.” Plate-form can be used as a public bench, a trekking ground, a skateboard rink: “I seek instead to introduce a rhythm into experience, a rhythm made possible by shapes that at times relate the possibility of a familiar and recognizable use to a less definable visual experience, at other times combine a clear visual experience with an indeterminate use”.

Made by quasi-industrial means, Plate-form is a work whose craftsmanship and artistic content are minimal; it could be likened to minimalist geometric sculptures insofar as it attempts to reduce to a strict minimum the relationships within a work and to make the sensation concrete and immediate. The relational component invites us to physically experience the work as a locus of raw emotion, as though “going along a wall, turning a corner or moving around a square”. Plate-form holds manifold interrelational experiences that will “trigger a mental image”, as pure sensation.