Łódź / Signum Foundation Gallery
18 XII 2015 – 18 II 2016

TADEUSZ KANOTR „The abstract art is dead, long live abstract art”

Exhibitions

The abstract art is dead, long live abstract art.

About Art Informel

 

Early 20th century art tackled the cold logical and intellectual approaches to the world, which was truly shocking to its contemporaries in ways we will never quite understand. Negating the objectiveness of the mind and everything that appears to be constricting, the art stripped itself of all of the unnecessary- leaving only proportions, construction, tensions, space, movement and time. Geometrical form became the highest purpose. Seen that way, an artwork became an invitation to a process of contemplation. It became an open plan, a proposition, an anticipation of the brand new world and human enterprise. And indeed – the world itself changed just as anticipated. Modern architecture, city planning, technology, new world order. It seemed that there was no place for art in this world. Even Mondrian was of the same opinion. He believed once art fulfilled its purpose, it will no longer be needed. Even before it got verified by life and reality, art has been confronted by forces and that have their sources beyond reason and intellect. Dark and elemental forces; totally absurd; full of rebellion and negation; fluid; non-compliant with any restraints; unpredictable- and from time to time it would have the curtain tear open to a landscape so unfathomable, so foreign and dangerous, that it threatened all utilitarian perceptions.  The ad-hoc experience and intellect would capitulate at the brink of this new world and so would our native theory of perception. The only instrument capable of studying and unveiling this world was the imagination, which was free of the restraints of the intellectual and experiential efforts. Art looked the subconsciousness, the instinct, the nonsense straight in the eye and revealed its true nature and mechanisms.

 

Simultaneously, paintings of all sorts evoked this new reality in ways no other media was capable of doing. One more step and a word had to be uttered: a coincidence. A phenomenon thus far ignored, seen as the lowest of the low; irresponsible; there for no reason; of a suspicious provenance; whisking off the intellect; lost in the infinity.

 

The Materiality-

an element and impetuousness; fierceness and limitlessness; density and slowness; fluidity and whimsiness; lightness and evanescence. The white hot, bursting, fluorescent, flooded with light, dead, still matter. A solidification that’s abundant in all traces of life possible. No construction, only texture. A different space – a different definition of movement.

 

Only a coincidence intervened decisively.  A coincidence in a painting is where the matter defines and forms itself independently, and human intervention is only in the initial stimulus. Introducing this element into art must have been a stumbling block to all of the rigorous canons built by the geometric abstraction and the like.

 

The word “coincidence” is not to be trivialised or vulgarised. Not to be confused with “randomness”. A man, who comes in contact with the coincidence and fails, will naturally perceive it as absurd and nonsensical. Only taking full command of the coincidence creates new reality.

 

Reality of a painting is not instant or immediate. It mounts up. One cannot predict its epilogue. A coincidence is what irritates it. It is the struggle between the reality of the painting,  thus its illusion, with the actual reality. It is the human imagination tackling the reality of the world.

 

Selected excerpts form “On Informel Art” by Tadeusz Kantor, from “Zycie Literackie”, issue 50, 1955, a weekly literally & cultural reviews newspaper.

 

Kantor’s paintings displayed in the exhibition are from the Signum Foundation Collection.

 

The film “Uwaga!….malarstwo” (“Attention!…painting”) showing Tadeusz Kantor at work in 1957 is on hire from a private collection (directed by Mieczyslaw Waskowski and Antoni Nurzynski)

 

 

Curated by: Grzegorz Musial

 

Signum Foundation Gallery, Ul. Piotrkowska 85, Łódź