#CHEAP TERRAZZO TILES SERIES#

Cast in concrete in hulking wooden molds, these stones disclose their vibrant striations only when Meyer shapes his functional sculptures - including a series of blocky, prehistoric-looking earth-tone tables and stools - using a diamond saw blade or a tool akin to a giant wire cheese slicer. In the Norwegian port town of Asgardstrand, the artist Tron Meyer, 39, scours the beach for large sea-smoothed pebbles and moraine rocks left behind by glaciers. And in contrast to the neutral uniformity of past eras, these artists are imbuing their work with personal narratives and an enduring sense of place. But a generation of makers are now reimagining the craft, challenging conventions of scale and value by experimenting with everything from whole rocks to precious gems. Because of this ubiquity - Bush characterizes terrazzo’s two dominant presentations in contemporary design as “Urban Outfitters” and “beige county clerk building” - artists have often overlooked it. In one of many revivals, it became a mainstay of millennial interiors in the 2010s, thanks partly to the popularity of the British designer Max Lamb’s innovative large-aggregate Marmoreal version, developed in 2014. Affordable and durable but polished to a luxurious sheen, the compound has become a commonplace of modern architecture, found everywhere from subway stairwells to the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Terrazzo has always been an improvisational material: It’s thought to have originated when 16th-century Venetian artisans salvaged unusable chunks of marble from their building projects, setting them into the floors of their own homes. The results suggest Roman mosaics by way of Brooklyn: “Date Palm Tree (Tree of Paradise)” (2018), a 6-by-2-foot composition in a pine frame, depicts a palm tree with a wiggly trunk and faux-naïve fronds from which hang fruits inlaid with sections of real date pits. Martinez Cohen and Bush combine their unconventional rock substitutes with colored cement or epoxy, forming a slurry that they pour into zinc and brass outlines to create kitschy, expressionistic tableaus.

Since then, they have added peach stones, oyster shells, the royal blue glass of Saratoga water bottles, petrified wood and deer bones - discovered on Martinez Cohen’s parents’ property in upstate New York - to the mix of marble chips, other stone fragments and cement that is traditionally ground up to make terrazzo, the speckled composite material that has become the pair’s primary medium. The two artists founded their joint sculptural practice, Ficus Interfaith, nine years ago. For the Queens-based duo Raphael Martinez Cohen, 34, and Ryan Bush, 32, terrazzo is a way to repurpose the detritus of daily life.

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