patternsthatconnect

Is it just me, or is there something thoroughly optimistic about the pattern I have been working with, once it is constructed in these colours?

Constructive Context, 2012, ink on paper, 6"x6"

“One of the most intriguing things about models is that once a valid correspondence has been set up between the subject and its image, the model may reveal aspects of the subject not obvious to direct consideration…A diagram may be used as an empirical tool for discovering new properties in some conceptual structure”.

Far from mechanically repeating a pre-existent concept or structure, constructivism can be in a real sense a technique of discovery – a source of new knowledge through aesthetic response to the material object.

Stephen Bann, Catalogue for Constructive Context exhibition, 1978 (quoting from Systems exhibition catalogue 1972).

Thank you Artista for bringing my attention to the Lygia Pape exhibition Magnetized Space currently showing at the Serpentine Gallery, until 19 February 2012. Although you don’t seem to much like the show you say that the work Livro do Tempo (or the Book of Time) is the highlight for you. What a highlight! I must admit to being new to this work and now really keen to go and see it.

Lygia Pape Livro do Tempo (Book of Time) 1961-63 Installation view Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2011 © Projeto Lygia Pape and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

Here’s a short video of Adrian Searle discussing Pape’s work in general, and Livro do Tempo in particular.

Barbara Hepworth’s homage to Mondrian is a cruciform construction, entitled crucifixion

more of a cruciform than a crucifixion in my view, unless the angular lines in contrast to the curved shapes that are much more typical of Hepworth’s sculpture (easily seen in these installation shots of the Hepworth, Wakefield) imply suffering, inhumanity, separation and death, which they might well do (?)

I have posted before about the drawing method I have been using in my recent work.

Here’s a short video demonstration.

The music playing faintly in the background is Open by Joshua Sellers from his album Amniosis (used with permission).

Whilst nothing is really new there is an approach to drawing that is new to me. Of course I draw a little when preparing the canvases, dividing the space into equal areas before painting them. Constructing.

Then there is a secondary kind of drawing, that perhaps approaches sculpture, as I combine the stretchers in different ways to create a variety of constructions.

Stretchers are turned and re-combined.

I have said before that I find I read narrative into the process, as well as reading the spaces in very different ways, depending on each particular combination.

Fired by the Constructivist art that emerged in Russia from c.1915, architects transformed this radical artistic language into three dimensions, creating structures whose innovative style embodied the energy and optimism of the new Soviet Socialist state.

According to Donald D Hofffman, when we construct colour, we use a wider area of our visual field to determine the colour we see at a point. The context changes what we see.

When we construct colour, rather than colour alone we construct several visual properties all at the same time, and we attempt to make those properties mutually consistent.

When we see the world we are far more than passive observers, the very act of seeing is an act of construction, of sense making, long before we even begin to consciously ‘make sense of it’.

The exhibition was entitled Construction and its Shadow (at Leeds Art Gallery, see previous blog). Was the curator referring specifically (as a metonym) to the piece in the show by Cullinan Richards, suspended from the ceiling, entitled How far can you get in the figurative grey no. 3, (2008), towards which a light is projected, casting the construction’s shadow on the wall (circled in the photo so you can see what’s going on more clearly)?

Shadow is an interesting word. It has negative connotations, the shadow in Jung is the ‘dark side’ that can be transformed, (I acknowledge that in that process it is supposed to be appreciated); in leadership theory it is the ‘shadow of the leader’ (I could argue that all of leadership is shadow in the negative sense). It also has positive associations of influence. Constructivism and systems have positively influenced abstract art. There’s an old story in the New Testament of people bringing the sick out into the streets in case the apostle Peter’s shadow would fall upon them and they would be healed.  I like this meaning of shadow as extension of self, influence beyond the immediacy of the body.