“Disintegrating Cars” is Stunning Destruction, Suspended in Time

 

                    

By George Kennedy        

Any car enthusiast worth their salt has a few favorite car cutaways. For me, it’s the Ferrari 250 GTO. It’s hard not to love the sketch of the V12 nestled between front wheels in driver, in perfect “front-mid” configuration. The cutaway’s lesser-known, but equally cool cousin is the “explosion,” in which a car or engine is disassembled and spread out in an arrangement that provides some logic to the assembly process.

There are some very cool explosion diagrams of engines and entire vehicles, but they are nothing like these incredible displays seen here. They are the creation of Fabien Oefner, and it is an art installation called “Disintegrating Cars” and is currently on display at M.A.D. Gallery (Mechanical Art Devices) in Geneva. Each work is truly breathtaking.

 

Each car looks like it is a full-size vehicle, disassembled and suspended, but they are actually meticulous scale models. Fabien Oefner spends two months painstakingly placing each piece in position in hundreds of phases for hundreds of individual shots. Cars include the Jaguar E-Type, Mercedes-Benz 30o SLR, and gorgeous Ferrari 330 P4.

 

There is no use of CGI, but Oefner, said the very real pieces take inspiration from computer graphics:

I have always been fascinated by the clean, crisp looks of 3D renderings. So I tried to use that certain type of aesthetic and combine it with the strength of real photography. These images are also about capturing time: either in stopping it as in the Hatch series or inventing it as in the Disintegrating series

These images are truly breathtaking, and are perfect wallpaper material! You can see all of his “Disintegrating Cars” work here.