My basic, idiotic take on Mondrian is that he’s one of the hardest artists to see. I don’t mean that you have to climb a lot of stairs or find your way through a maze. I don’t mean that curators like to bombard you with dry ice as you approach. I mean that, once I look at a Mondrian – the classic grid-based Compositions kind of Mondrian – it’s always been quite hard for me to really take it in. His squares and lines and blocks of primary colour have been thoroughly co-opted by the advertising and design industries. He belongs to the billboards now. He’s on cosmetic bottles and dresses and iPhone cases. He’s retro even – not 1930s retro, retro. (These are possibly all excuses: in reality Mondrian just makes me feel a bit stupid.)
Please, Touch the Artwork reviewPublisher: Thomas WaterzooiDeveloper: Thomas WaterzooiPlatform: Played on iOSAvailability: Out now on PC, iOS and Android, and coming to Switch
Oh, and he’s also the kind of artist that makes a certain kind of person say, “Well, I could’ve done Give me a ruler and a bunch of red and black and blue and yellow paint, and I could knock out Mondrians all day.” Look at those elements of the classic Mondrian – again, the grid-based L’Oreal Mondrian that most easily comes to mind. Black lines. Blocks of flat colour. This Mondrian is surely a creature of MS Paint?
So even at this level, Please, Touch the Artwork does people like me a service. Those lines and blocks look so simple, but working on your own Mondrians turns out to be surprisingly hard to do. You can have all the pieces of the L’Oreal Mondrian, the lines, the right colours, and it just looks wrong. Actually, it’s really tricky to get it to look right.
Please, Touch the Artwork is a playful puzzle game inspired by abstract art. But it’s also, I think, something else. It’s an attempt to get you to the art afresh, to see it as part of a lineage that can be understood, to see the way it has evolved and shifted forms over time, and to have a go yourself in a manner of speaking. By using three abstract paintings as the foundations for three types of puzzle, Please, Touch the Artwork encourages you to dabble in the of abstract art, which is the part of art that we generally don’t get to see. You may be trying to solve something in the game, to beat a level, but you’re also making choices, thinking critically. The first wall to an appreciation of abstract art – that the art is, you know, finished, and hanging in a gallery and you can only get so close – that wall comes down. Please, touch! See what you can do. For me it was a revelation.