While I have not caught Olympic Fever, I watched the Parade of Nations at the opening ceremony with considerable interest. There was an outcry about the uniforms Ralph Lauren designed for the American team because they had been manufactured in China, yet none at all because they were unflattering (lumpen blue berets, white loafers with bobby socks) and heavily branded (logos on both cap and blazer). The Brasilians, who wore fitted yellows and green separates, were the best dressed team; they gave off joy and heat. The British, in space-age white-and-gold jackets, missed the opportunity to do something entirely unironic (Chariots of Fire white flannels) or entirely ironic (trenchcoats and Hunter boots). Instead the Bermudans, in white dress shirts, navy jackets and red Bermuda shorts (identical to those they sported, brazenly, at the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver) took both those prizes. At the center of it all Usain Bolt, in slim yellow trousers, looked fittingly majestic carrying the Jamaican flag.

But my favorite costume was the little cap-sleeved A-line dresses the young women carrying the country signs for each team wore. The fronts of the dresses were printed with a crowd of contemporary faces, which were meant, I think, to represent the crazy and happy diversity of city of London, the Games, and the whole wide world. I don’t know who designed them or the signs themselves, which floated above each girl like a halo. The get-up reminded me of the dresses Hussein Chalayan has crafted out of wood, fiberglass and Tyvek, which are less like garments than contraptions. There’s something cerebral, innocent and eccentric about these little Olympic dresses that, for the overscaled, overblown event, was exactly right.

July 30, 2012 by Nalina Moses

The exhibit of work by Roberto Burle Marx, the legendary Brazilian landscape architect, at Rooster Gallery is called Tablecloth, after a large canvas one he painted in the 1960’s that’s been cleaned, stretched and given pride of place in the small gallery. Burle Marx is best known for designing the park Ibirapuera in Sao Paulo and for his collaborations with architect Oscar Niemeyer and planner Lucio Costa, including the grounds of several civic buildings in Brasilia. The tablecloth, along with the seven other paintings in the show, were gifts from Burle Marx to José Ramoa, a Portuguese art collector and close friend. At the opening reception the tablecloth, rendered in dizzying, overlapping patterns, made a stylish backdrop for patrons strolling back and forth with capirinhas in hand.

When you look at a painting by an architect (like one by Le Corbusier, or Michael Graves, or Zaha Hadid), you’re likely to find the same forms they employ in their architecture, but lacking their dynamism. Somehow these architects aren’t always able to capture the life of their architecture in their art; their two-dimensional works are unnaturally dulled. So I was surprised to see Burle Marx’s smaller paintings, which have a dense, sculptural sensibility altogether different from his landscape designs. You can spot similar amoeba-like geometries in both, to be sure, but the paintings boast a spatial complexity that’s different in character from his best-known garden designs, which seem to be primarily graphic. Is there more life in this great landscape architect’s paintings than in his gardens?