Art Central 2022

Marina Apollonio, Marcello Morandini, Horacio Garcia Rossi

herman de vries, Yvaral

26 May – 29 May 2022

Novalis Art Design, Booth A2

Hall 3FG, Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre

Optical Perspectives
Vera Canevazzi

“We want to interest the viewer, disinhibit him, put him at ease. We want him to participate. We want to put him in a situation that he himself sets in motion and transforms. We want him to be aware of his participation. We want him to orient himself towards an interaction with other viewers. We want to develop in the viewer a strong capacity for perception and action. A spectator who conscious of his power of action and tired of so many abuses and mystifications, will be able to bring on a true revolution in art.”

Group Manifesto GRAV, Assez des Mystifications, 1963

 

In occasion of Art Central Hong Kong 2022, Novalis Art Design gallery presents Optical Perspectives, a curatorial project centered on Optical Art, explored through a selection of works by some of the exponents close to this movement: Marina Apollonio, Marcello Morandini, Horacio Garcia Rossi, Yvaral, Dadamaino, Armando and herman de vries.

Optical Art, whose representing artists come from a variety of experiences, develops between the mid-1950s and the end of the 1960s, placing itself in continuity with the geometric/abstract experimentations of the historical avant-garde movements at the beginning of the 1900s, such as Futurism, Constructivism, and the school of Bauhaus whose instances were adopted by ‘kinetic’ artists through a renewed study of the relation between art, psychology and technology.

The optical artistic research focuses on the human visive perception and on the interaction between viewer and work of art. It is based on theoretical principles of Gestalt psychology, according to which the totality of what we perceive is not only characterized by the sum of the individual sensorial stimulations, but also by the shape that we give to things, that allow us to understand the object in its totality. The role of the user becomes fundamental because it is only through his perception that the work of art fully takes shape. As Umberto Eco writes, these kinds of works can be called “open works” because they lend themselves to multiple interpretations and they become complete only in the eye of the viewer.

To plan works of art capable of involving the public, optical artists must sacrifice their creative individuality: by refusing the idea of the isolated genius they often plan works together. In fact, in the 1960s, simultaneously around the world, different groups focused on this formal research (such as Group T in Milan, Group N in Padua, GRAV in Paris, Group Zero in Düsseldorf ) and collective shows emerged. Among these, five exhibitions Nove Tendencije in Zagreb, organized between 1961 and 1973, were memorable for their capacity to attract all the major experimenters of the time: the Italians Dadamaino, Marina Apollonio and Marcello Morandini, the Argentinian Horacio Garcia Rossi, the French Yvaral and the Dutch herman de vries, all artists that are grouped again today in Novalis’s stand.

The artists created optical effects through the use of minimal geometries, materials that can capture and diffuse light, and mechanisms that can modify the appearance of the works in time. Thus Marina Apollonio ( Trieste, 1940 ), who was close to the research of groups T and N, develops the theories of Optical Art focusing on themes of dynamism and circularity, as the title Circular Dynamic that she gives to her works suggest. In these works, created from 1964 onwards with various techniques, such as Indian Ink on paper or enamel on wood, Marina Apollonio uses black and white geometric drawings and repeats fluid circular lines that create optical concave and convex movements, involutions and evolutions of the shapes. Furthermore, in her manual rotation works the perceptive game is even more exaggerated: the works morph in time, gain volume, thanks to the involvement of the viewer, whose eye runs in different directions, feeling at the same time disoriented and impressed.

Another great admirer of the expressive potentials of black and white is Marcello Morandini ( Mantua, 1940 ), who, in all his artistic creations in art, architecture, design and fashion exclusively uses these two tones, combining them with rigorous design and extreme inventiveness of compositions and morphologies. As the artist explains in an interview for “AD” in 2021, “We don’t need lots of things to explain what we want. With black and white you can say everything: music is written in black and white. World knowledge is made of black and white”. The choice to use two colors allows the artist to valorize the shape and movement that is created, thus in Sedia Bine ( 1991 ), a design object made for Sawaya and Moroni, perspective is accentuated through a series of lines that emphasize the silhouette of a chair. Even in storage furniture Valentina and Costanza ( 2015 ) he adopts a two-tone design, while in Stuhltisch ( 2014 ), a surrealist-inspired table made for Atelier Bruno Longoni, the choice is all white.

While Morandini seeks design perfection, and not optical-perceptual disorientation, Horacio Garcia Rossi ( Buenos Aires, 1929 – Paris, 2012 ) works on the concept of movement, representing it directly in the work itself, in a short circuit between image and its meaning. The work Mouvement (1964/1965) is a prototype of the large-scale work found today at Centre Pompidou Museum in Paris, and it is one of the oldest experiments that combine light, word and action. The inscription “Mouvement” appears on a screen, repeated several times, and its letters move thanks to back lighting effects, creating an ambiguous and unstable vision.

The concept of instability is also found in the work of Yvaral ( Paris, 1934-2002 ), son of Victor Vasarely. He is a founding member of the Parisian group GRAV, alongside Garcia Rossi. In his work Instability ( 1963 ), consisting of painted sticks arranged evenly, Yvaral creates a sort of display case, reminiscent of the kind used by museums to contain valuable works, antique jewellery or books, but his particular composition eludes all attempts to grasp its content. The viewer sees a black shadow, due to the different colors of the sticks whose boundaries are not identifiable: they present a nebulous appearance that changes with the movement of the viewer. If in Garcia Rossi the morphing of the work over time is caused by an electric motor and in the works of Marina Apollonio by the manual action of the viewer, in this case it is the movement of those who look and walk around the work to determine a plurality of visions.

In Dadamaino ( Milano, 1930-2004 ) instead, it is the continuous search for new expressive experiments that generates formal change: the well-known Milanese artist in fact works on the repetition/variation of shapes, on tonal gradations and with a wide variety of materials. In her Reliefs we perceive a contamination between optical studies and spatial ones of Lucio Fontana and of the artists orbiting around Azimut gallery in Milan. In fact, the artist, in these works of 1965 made on colored cardboard, explores the third dimension by opening small modular cross slits, arranged in one or more parallel rows. In Dynamic Optical Drawing (1960) and in Color Variant White-Blue-Violet (1965), which are more in line with the principles of Optical Art, Dadamaino plays with the repetition of geometric shapes, varying their sizes and colours, so as to create special illusionistic visual effects.

Finally, the two artists of Dutch origin, Armando and herman de vries seek through their works to regulate or synthesize the multitude. Armando ( Amsterdam, 1929 ), born Herman Dirk van Dodeweerd, pours his eclectic character into the search of a total work of art, a “Gesamtkunstwerk” in which different artistic disciplines merge. Coming from informal research, with themes strongly linked to the horrors of the Second World War, in the work Untitled (1960) he synthesizes the pictorial brushstroke, transforming it into light dots arranged in a seemingly spontaneous way, in a minimalist visual game that shows a closeness to optical art and to studies by the Dutch Group Nul and of Group Zero.

herman de vries ( Alkmaar, 1931 ), whose name and surname are written in lower case to avoid hierarchization between letters, arranges the elements in a seemingly disorganized way. In reality, the randomness is controlled through principles related to repetition, rhythm, space and colours. So in Random Objectivation, created starting from 1962, the artist starts from the random choice of numbers taken from the tables dedicated to Random Numbers ( tav. XXXIII ) of the treatise Statistical tables for biological, agricultural and medical research of 1953. Then he assigns to each number a value that guides him in the composition, bringing randomness back to a controlled objectification. Everything is reduced to a minimum and to the essential in order to give more resonance to the internal characters of the individual pictorial elements that placed in relation to each other, to create visual constellations.

 

SELECTED WORKS