THE WONDERS OF VISION AT MO...
THE WONDERS OF VISIONAt Mondrian’s Studio. In his memoirs, with that mixture of lucidity and premonitory enthusiasm with which revelations are announced, Calder describes how deeply impacted he was on his first visit to Mondrian’s studio in Paris. What was revealed to him there, that “shock that makes things start”, was not found on the canvases, nor even in the painter himself, but on “the walls painted white and divided by black lines into brightly coloured rectangles, like his paintings”, which covered the apartment. Calder glimpsed the beginning of a movement in those coloured shapes set free by the immaculate white space of the studio; he sensed an explosion of life in the contained silence of the neoplastic order. It would appear that, in the frenzy of his rapture, Calder went as far as suggesting to him that it might be fun to make these rectangles oscillate, to which the circumspect Mondrian replied indignantly: “No, it is not necessary: my painting is already very fast”. Much later, having lived through the war and his exile to New York, Mondrian – a tireless dancer – was eventually to shed the static rigorism of his Paris compositions, to allow himself be carried away by the furious urban pace in “Broadway Boogie-Woogie”.
An experience of space, movement, life ... For Bridget Riley, a great admirer of the American Mondrian, the creative impulse arises from the “need to share experiences” and it is in this “transmission”, that Benjamin wanted to be “by word of mouth”, in that place where artist and spectator come together, that the work of art is accomplished. Mondrian compared his compositions to the rhythm of breathing; Riley saw them as living organisms. From the heartbeat in Mondrian’s works to Riley’s vibrant surfaces or Cristina Silván’s dizzy swinging, there is a tradition that understands painting as a space in which things happen, as a “field of events”, as Eco says. An art that is a crossroads of possibilities, that is pure happening, prolonged time, delayed space, that calls on our memory, that is to do with our experience and requires our intervention for it to occur. Silvan’s geometries possess this virtuality: sliding curves are gently deployed only to coil up in an abrupt sidestep; they zigzag, seemingly changing direction but eventually coming to a sudden end. They throb with the excitement of the unexpected, the adventure and surprises with which life binds us to the unstoppable flow of time.
At an Amusement Park. Mondrian, in his neoplastic room, may have dreamed up neoplastic paintings. Cristina Silván, in her dreams, catches glimpses of another world, which is the subliminal extension of her painting: she describes her dreams as resembling an amusement park.
The amusement park is the mirror-image space in which the boundaries between the real and the virtual fade away. The fact is that there is something ghostly about that illuminated architecture, sparkling, caught up in the darkness of the night, yet unlikely in the difficult balance of anti-gravitational forces that hold it up. Koolhaas, in a subtle X-ray of New York, likens Coney Island, the first amusement park, to the subconscious flip-side of Manhattan. The leisure possibilities offered by this phantasmagorical electric city where technology is at the service of delirium and fantasies, are no more than a subliminated reproduction of modern urban experience, of the biomechanical pace of the metropolitan cogwheels, of gravity, acceleration and vertigo. In this dreamlike space, emotions in their pure state are released, an experience that falls between anxiety and euphoria, blending pleasure and disaster for just an instant; Eros and Thanatos fleetingly suspended in orgiastic exaltation.
A maze of mirrors, a wondrous enclosure, the fairground is the selfsame place of the artistic. Cristina Silván is familiar with this ground and, like a conjurer, draws us into the game. She projects hypnotic images for us, draws improbable figures, leads us through labyrinthine spaces; confounds our senses, shatters our expectations and, in an unexpected juggling act, lights a spark of the impossible before our eyes. After all, painting has always been the space of artifice and magic.
Rosa Gutiérrez Herranz