Your centered frame, in 4 artists
What do an Impressionist painter who never recognised himself as such, a graphic designer who was a champion of surfing, an architect that, arguably, never built a building and a Japanese master of the art of woodcutting who still felt like just getting the gist of it all at the young age of 80 years have in common? Hokusai, Degas, Matta-Clark, Carson. Coming from different pages in a History book of old and new pages, stranded, dispersed on an old Mapa Mundi globe and spread across the timeline of a sand clock, what do these names have in common?
To me, in an imaginary museum (is there another type of museum that does not deal with the menagerie of the imaginary?) of the interrupted image, all these names, in three different languages, become our point of encounter, being practitioners of the elapsed art of something similar to the idea of an incomplete gestalt image, that image that plays with the viewer, showing us the amorphic chaos of the world with the incompleteness of ambiguity of quirkiness. Where, in your daily life, are the symmetrical compositions? the centred framings? the harmonic perceptions? No, that is not what you find out there, no. Not at all. Where is your calibrated perspective? These creators took up the mantle of realism in another inconspicuous, lateral, exquisite way. Your quick gaze, your unframed glance. Your daily life, full of incomplete information, of interrupted meanings. What is then in the interrupted image? The not-at-all-complete perception, the broken mirror, the blurred sight.
The knowledge, forever out of reach, is incomplete but present. Intuitively felt, but not quite there. German academics during the early 20th century, tried to explore the way we see and understand things in what had become the realm of cognitive psychology. Enter the amodal perception, one of their most curious and practical concepts - they had many more and grouped them into the laborious term Gestalt), where seeing is the key to building a perceptual model to later rebuild information and shape the elegant structure built in Gestalt mode.
As a consequence of historical changes, it is known how Japanese printing, freed from its medieval isolation, influenced European art of the 19th century. Their quietly linear landscapes bathed with vivid, plain and contrasting colours offered a new way of seeing things in the time, let's not forget, of black and white photographs, daguerrotypes and print where realism seemed to have reached a dead end as a tool for communicating the world and its powers. These heterodox perspectives were something else. Quite direct, they didn't entertain you with tons of perceptual, tactile details; they offered a deceptive simplicity and impact. The high contrast of the lines used so starkly was something Europe had forgotten long ago.
All of them take a non-central non-orthodox non-intelligible approach to the image. These three authors appeal to the heterodoxy of the interruption, of the unbalanced proposal and in this sense, they brought a refreshing intervention to the dialogues they were part of. Specific pieces.
Hokusai (Japan, 1760-1849), a master of the Japanese tradition. The prints have different angles, different perspectives, and at its best, a palatable modernity that escapes the straightjacketed notion of composition in vogue in Europe at the moment. Japanese art is a tradition in itself and shows a different approach to space.
Edgar De Gas, Degas (France, 1834-1917), a near-relative of the Impressionist family, was a master of the photographic image in painting, spontaneously interrupted, helping him to catch the sensation of movement, not necessarily in the movement itself but in the uncomfortable poses, transitional phases produced by the body in motion as well as in the alteration of the classical framing in each one of this steps. Yes, Degas takes inspiration from Japanese print design and photography, a mix that he pushes into his academic formation to refresh it in the search of a brand of realism soaked in this spontaneous framing product of novelty both in time (photo) and space (Far East). Awkward angles, acrobatic yet almost grotesque positions sometimes, and incomplete images at the borders of the composition are the elements of the mix while retaining the chiaroscuro, palette and fundamentals of traditional drawing. But is this incomplete framing aspect that gets me and helps to break the perception of the image.??
Gordon Matta-Clark ( United States, 1943-1978) as an artist/architect also played with these illusions, breaking the views of the building and the processed image, in his case to show the flexibility of our conceptions of space at many levels, starting from the perceptual to extend to the social ( his experiments in radical restauranterie complement this last aspect).
David Carson (United States, b 1955) the renowned designer, does not necessarily by the same motivation, wants also to find the expressiveness in the type and hiding and showing as well is a technique. Legibility and communication are for him, concepts that get confused frequently obtruding each other for most design practitioners. His works are not shy of breaking the grid and the words to express their purpose, as his celebrated covers have shown, navigating legibility through a randomly kaleidoscopic collage, interrupting, twisting letters and bringing to the front the shapes that are invisibilised unconsciously by our decoding.
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While Degas takes inspiration from Japanese design and photography, Carson, a post-Bauhaus designer wants to find the expressivity in the type, hiding and showing as technique, questioning with his works the paradigm of, among others, the Swiss design. Not irrelevant detail is that lately, Carson, whose fame came through the impact of the magazine covers made for Raygun, a publication for surfing enthusiasts, has taken a more shaped inspiration from works of painters such as Rothko, where big planes of colour express themselves in the covering and showing off other smaller elements. His current endeavours on texture and materiality have taken him to exploration of both street art and Abstract expressionism, as can be seen in his latest projects.
The hidden, semihidden object implies another statement, as it inevitably decentralises the image. To decentralize the image, to bring the focus to the fringes. To smuggle the point of the viewer's attention through the edges of the composition. Communicating through an incomplete image, appealing to a Gestalt, but also hiding subtly, just to let you know. Art and design where the image is shown on a need-to-know basis. An art of confidentiality and expressivity, an incomplete elegance and an off-the-centre charm. The perspective without a centre, the world, flowing round and around and your gaze with it, free and uncompromised.
#art #arthistory #curatorship #artwriting
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