Elena Di Raddo, presentation of the individual exhibition at “Il Chiostro”, Saronno
Beyond the instant
The research of American painters in the Eighties, linked to the second generation of Op artists including, among others, Ross Bleckner and Philip Taaffe, has overturned the formalist categories that had characterized historical abstractionism. Their works go beyond the old opposition between abstract and figurative theorized by Clement Greenberg in the years after World War II, with a new interaction between artistic and cultural elements that had once been considered incompatible.
The factors contributing to this innovation comprise scientific discoveries like the opening of the frontiers of art to diversified forms of communication, the overcoming of spatial barriers provided by Internet, the diffusion of the graphics of information technology circuits. Imperceptibly small entities made visible by microscopic images, and the infinite, not just spatial but also sensorial, have, with their concrete presence, changed the limits of time and space. Similarly, the ways we perceive our I, bodily and psychic, have been influenced by the scientific possibilities of going beyond the physical and moral limits of death, with implications of also a sociological character. In fact, in their works these artists seek to render their image of the world, appropriating the idea that had been linked to Optical Art, in the late Sixties, to represent the possibility to transform the logic of profit inherent in modernity into aesthetics, precisely by using industrial materials, synthetic colors and paints of more recent invention.
In paintings that venture beyond the limits of abstraction and figuration, as a consequence of these new, ampler perceptive horizons, the Eighties have seen a merger and mixture of all external stimuli, not in order to reinvent a language, but to redefine it, beyond a mere desire to explore optical effects. In the forms that emerge from the lines and the colors, in the aesthetic valences of the materials, the real becomes “concrete”, surfacing in the form of images evoking biological entities.
It is in this context that the work of Jorunn Monrad belongs, even if her paintings are updated by a greater symbolic sensibility, demonstrated by the presence of a single constant motive that is repeated all over the canvas. Her works participate intimately in the present, to the point that they are sometimes associated with computer art, but at the same time they are rooted in theoretical principles with a long history, and in very ancient cultural stimuli. In fact, her art aims to be timeless, above time, using the category of time in the amplest possible sense.
In her paintings, realized with great technical skill and an almost maniacal manual dexterity, we perceive the influence of the ancient wooden decorations of the religious buildings of Northern Europe. It is from a repeated observation of those sculptures decorating portals and structures through a great proliferation of biomorphic and phytomorphic beings that the small animal figure, a kind of lizard that represents the key element of her pictorial process, is inspired. It represents a cellular reproductive movement that completely fills the surface of the canvas.
Through the almost organic multiplication of these signs a perceptive movement surfaces in the work, generated by effects that are at the same time optical and psychological. We may recognize, in this mechanism, the overcoming of the limit, postulated by Jacques Aumont, of what Lessing had defined, in the early 19th century, the “pregnant instant”: a particular condition in a work of art that supposedly succeeded in capturing the most significant instant of an action, episode or movement. In fact, Aumont considers that theory to be applicable only to art preceding the invention of photography, and unsuited to a painting that since impressionism cultivates the ephemeral, the circumstance, the sensation. But Monrad’s painting is anything but a painting of instantaneous sensations, it is a painting that reflects a profounder perceptive logic, even if it conforms to the principle of instant, in that its very existence is linked to a precise moment of fruition, to the particular optical predisposition of the observer.
Already Pliny had written that “the mind is the true instrument of sight and observation, the eye acts like a kind of receptacle that receives and transmits the visible part of consciousness”. In the Nineteenth century one theorized how the vision of reality, and thus also of a work of art, is the result of a complex psychological process. When observing Monrad’s work a perceptive mechanism is triggered on several levels: the immediate one of the coloristic and luminous refraction that gives rise to a visual disturbance, and the slower one associated with the identification of the content of the painting. In fact, beneath the colorful and glaring texture that creates an internal optical movement, words and complete phrases surface, unveiling the literary and theoretic reference of the work. It is in this dual mechanism activated by the painting that we may identify the pregnant instant and the oxymoron of this definition. The painter ventures beyond the concept of instantaneousness and accidentality in the moment in which she realizes the paintings.
Moreover, another justification of the association with the idea of pregnant instant may be observed in the work of Monrad. In fact, the sentences hidden behind the decorative texture conceal references to texts by Thomas De Quincey and Walter Benjamin on the hallucinatory visions of those who use drugs, and thus to an artificial vision accessible to the eye in particular conditions. A synthetic dimension, that therefore does not exist in reality, in the same way as the very idea of pregnant instant does not exist in the real world, which is on the contrary made of countless instants. We may thus conclude that the painting of Monrad is one that, far from being purely scientific, like Sixties’ Op Art was, is on the contrary deeply symbolic, by virtue of being continuously allusive. It creates a world that exists parallelly with the real one, within reality, a metahistory, availing itself precisely of elements inspired by history and tradition.
Elena Di Raddo
[ back to index ]