Art Basel 2013 - "Importance of being abstract" / "Energizing the Abstract" an imagenistical approach by Paul Rolans

The Art Newspaper

“Importance of being abstract”

Abstract art dominates the fair as collectors seek less flashy works and artists begin to update the form

By Charlotte Burns, Melanie Gerlis and Julia Michalska. From Art Basel daily edition
Published online: 12 June 2013

Abstract art, the form that dominated the 20th century, once again reigns supreme at the 44th edition of Art Basel. As the fair opened yesterday to the great, the rich and the famous—including the man of the month, Massimiliano Gioni, the director of the Venice Biennale, Russia’s power couple Roman Abramovich and Dasha Zhukova, and the actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Lukas Haas—visitors were confronted with a variety of non-representative, non-figurative art.

Historical pieces by abstract pioneers include kinetic sculptures by Alexander Calder (such as Blue Flower, Red Flower, 1975, at Tina Kim/Kukje, 2.0/F6, priced at $2.8m), Minimalist wall pieces by Donald Judd (including Untitled (Ballantine 89-49), 1989, priced at $2.4m with David Zwirner, 2.0/F5) and various large abstract works by Richter (a 1984 example is on show at Richard Gray Gallery, 2.0/E4, priced at $6.5m; a piece from 1992 is on offer with Dominique Lévy Gallery, 2.0/F4, for “under $20m”). In equal abundance are works by contemporary artists who have taken on the abstract mantle, including Christopher Wool (Untitled, 2001, at Luhring Augustine, 2.0/E13, $1.5m) and Albert Oehlen (FM44, 2011, which sold to a European collector for €250,000 within hours of the fair’s opening at Galerie Max Hetzler, 2.0/E7).

“The abstract abounds,” says Lisa Spellman, the founder of New York’s 303 Gallery (2.1/J21). She is showing non-figurative works priced between $150,000 and $250,000, including two large 2013 works by the gallery’s recently recruited artist Jacob Kassay, which were bought together by a European private collector, and six ceramic works by Nick Mauss, which sold for $23,000 each. Sean Kelly (2.1/N2) designed his stand according to “different ideas of abstraction”, centred around Joseph Kosuth’s Titled (Art as Idea as Idea), 1967, priced at €100,000. “There’s a lot of really good [abstract] work being done across all media right now—painting, photography, conceptual—and we wanted to reflect that,” he says. New works on show include Callum Innes’s Untitled, 2013, a large oil and shellac canvas, which sold to a private US collector for £50,000.

The artist Ad Reinhardt famously said that his 1960s “black” abstract works marked the end of painting, but the abstract form “remains wide open to fresh contributions”, says Robert Storr, the dean of the Yale University School of Art, who is organising a Reinhardt exhibition for David Zwirner in New York this November. It is “one of the great inventions of Modern art that is barely a century old”—rather, it is “a century young”, he says. 

Can today’s artist move the once-radical form in a new, meaningful direction? “The problem is, there is a group of lower-tier abstract painters who are good and whose work looks beautiful, but what they are bringing to the table in terms of art history is nothing new. They are not adding to the conversation,” says the New York-based art adviser Lisa Schiff.

She highlights exceptions whom she thinks are “making enough of a formal innovation to stand alone”. These include the US artist Garth Weiser, whose Sedaka, 2013, sold for $55,000 to a private US collector within half an hour of the fair’s opening at Casey Kaplan (2.1/N16). Massimo De Carlo (2.1/N3) has hung three equal-sized abstract works by different artists next to each other, to “explore the possibilities of abstract art”, says Flavio del Monte, the gallery’s institutional relations manager. “We are bombarded by images everywhere today, so it is important for artists to take some distance,” he says. Loring Randolph, a director at Casey Kaplan, says: “The abstract is always relevant; you can have a rhetoric behind it that can be whatever you want.” Today’s practitioners, she says, “think about how the concept [of the abstract] and the process can work together”.

Process is key: artists are experimenting with materials and technology that were previously unavailable, to update the form. Denise René’s stand (2.0/D19) includes works by the Brussels-based artist group LAb[au]. The pieces, such as Particle Springs, 2011, priced at €27,000, use computer algorithms to create moving, smoke-like patterns on monitors. Mitchell-Innes & Nash (2.0/E6) is showing avant-garde masters such as Franz Kline (Provincetown II, 1959, around $10m) alongside younger artists including Keltie Ferris (Laissez-Faire, 2013, $50,000), whose work is inspired by graffiti and digitalisation.

For some, abstract art provides the chance to explore art history in a new way. At Galerie Nordenhake (2.1/P9), the 29-year-old artist Paul Fägerskiöld has used spray paint to create a homage to both Jackson Pollock and the Pointillists in his monochrome Untitled (Yellow), 2013, €25,000, which sold to a private German museum. At Sperone Westwater (2.0/E10), Emil Lukas’s thread-painting diptych panels Curtain East and Curtain West, 2013, which sold for $65,000, are influenced by Sol LeWitt. 

The trend is market-led, too. The boom years were characterised by flashy, self-explanatory art, but there has been a return to more thoughtful, abstract forms such as those produced by artists within the European Zero group. “We staged an exhibition of their work in 2008, which raised consciousness for an American audience to whom the work seemed new. The response was strong and has increased,” says Angela Westwater, the co-director of Sperone Westwater. The gallery is showing works by artists associated with the group, including Lucio Fontana’sConcetto spaziale, 1958, priced at around €1m, and Otto Piene’s 1975 oil and fire on canvas, Red Matters, priced at €250,000. Meanwhile, post-recession records have been achieved at auction for works by abstract artists, including the $43.8m paid for Barnett Newman’s Onement VI, 1953, at Sotheby’s in New York last month. “Collectors now want quieter, intellectual art with more depth. The years of the loud, funny works are over,” says Bob van Orsouw (2.1/P17), who is showing works including a wall sculpture by the Dutch conceptual artist Ger van Elk (Los Angeles Freeway Flyer, 1973, €125,000). 

The fact that much abstract art is easy on the eye (and looks good above the sofa) could be one of the attractions for some of the new buyers who have entered the market since 2008, according to some in the trade. “It doesn’t seem so long ago that figurative art was the latest fashion; now it’s good-looking abstract,” one London dealer says. Others do not see the problem. “Who says that decorative art is not also serious art? Matisse and virtually all of Islamic tradition attest to the fact that it is or can be,” Robert Storr says, adding: “Is Mondrian eye-candy?”

Signac, les couleurs de l´eau / Paul Rolans, des Images dans l´eau

„Dans le cadre de la seconde édition du festival Normandie Impressionniste consacrée au thème de l’eau, le musée des impressionnismes Giverny organise une exposition « Signac, les couleurs de l’eau ».

Comme Claude Monet, Paul Signac a trouvé une source d’inspiration constante dans l’évocation de l’eau et de ses couleurs.
Depuis les premières marines peintes sur le littoral normand avec une vigueur et une liberté impressionnistes jusqu’aux amples architectures portuaires aux couleurs vives d’après-guerre, la description de l’eau et du ciel offrirent à Signac un inépuisable prétexte à multiplier les variations chromatiques.”….continuez ici (site: Musée des Impressionnismes Giverny)

J´admire les oeuvres des impressionnistes beaucoup. Depuis dix ans,je travaille á mon projet “des Images dans l´eau“. Je le regarde comme une continuation de leur travail, avec des moyens d´aujourd´hui.

"Bountiful Harvest from the Color Fields - Keen Colorations à la Kenneth" by Paul Rolans

Color Field painting consciously distanced itself from societal referents and focused on the lyrical possibilities of color. For the first time since Impressionism, pure opticality held primacy over content and form. 

Michael McNay from The Guardian wrote:

Kenneth Noland, was one of the young artists tasked with seizing the star-spangled standard from the preceding warrior generation of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko and bearing it aloft into battle. Even more than this, Noland enjoyed having Americans claiming him as the successor to the mantle of Matisse, but in truth he had more in common with the Bauhaus abstractionist Josef Albers, who moved to the US and taught Noland at Black Mountain college, North Carolina. Noland disliked what he regarded as Albers's doctrinaire approach, but his own practice of geometric abstraction remained indelibly marked by the old German's influence.

Noland became celebrated in the 1950s for his series of concentric circles in a dazzling array of colours; not, like the paintings of Jasper Johns, targets, but circles as a simple geometric form that could demonstrate an infinite number of colour combinations. Next came circles with blurred edges, like blazing catherine wheels, diamond shapes, diamonds within circles, chevrons and stripes. The message was colour, usually pure and always simple.
Read more

Did you see the exhibition:

Colour Chart: Reinventing Colour, 1950 to Today, Tate Liverpool

BY CHARLES DARWENT

 SUNDAY 31 MAY 2009

The Independent

“Since there has been art, there have been disagreements about colour – what it means, how to use it, whether it is a good or bad thing.

Vasari held that colore was Venetian, while disegno – roughly, drawing – was Florentine and thus (Vasari was from Florence) better. The row rumbled on for 400 years: drawing was rational, clever, Poussin; colour was sensuous, sensual, Rubens. And so things stood until the 20th century, when two changes took place, the subject of a show called Colour Chart at Tate Liverpool.

The first change was that the number and kind of colours available to artists mushroomed with developments in paint-making. This wasn't just about stuff sold in art shops: for the first time, artists took to buying colours from their local B&Q.

An early apostle of household paint was Picasso, who waxed particularly lyrical about a commercial enamel called Ripolin. The first burst of colour on the dowdy palette of Analytic Cubism came courtesy of Ripolin, in Picasso's Violin, Glass, Pipe and Anchor of 1912.

Largely, though, the hues and tints of hardware paints were still used as a means to an end – to convey mood or rhythm, or to reproduce the warmth of sun on brick. It was only after the Second World War that the idea of color gratia coloris – colour for colour's sake – took off, marking a second phase in the 20th century's chromatic revolution.

Various things brought this about. The first was a rebellion against the valuing of skill which had held sway since Phidias. As far back as 1921, Aleksandr Rodchenko's Pure Red Colour, Pure Yellow Colour, Pure Blue Colour, shown at Tate Modern earlier this year, had hinted that the hand no longer counted in painting – that a canvas covered in a single pigment was as valid a work as the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Still, Rodchenko had made his statement in artist's oils. Now, nonart paints – the kind of stuff anyone might buy and use for anything – brought the point home.

Modernity wasn't going to dwell in an ivory tower, or at least in academies and art museums. It was going to be made in ex-light industrial lofts and factories, and its making would be open to anyone with a tin of paint and a roller. (Or, in the case of Dan Flavin and Donald Judd fluorescent tubes and a steel cutter.)

Commercial paints, familiar to anyone who had ever decorated a spare room or sprayed a bent fender, were a visible sign of what Colour Chart's curator, Ann Temkin, calls the "de-skilling" of art. It was all very democratic, although, as often with democracy, not completely so.

Actually, there were three requirements to being a modern artist: a tin of paint, a roller and an idea. Bound up in the dissing of the hand in art was a new fetishising of the mind – a way of working that Sol LeWitt dubbed "conceptual". LeWitt's Wall Drawing #918, a room-sized work, announces its intentions in eye-frying, shop-bought colours, in the fact that it has a number rather than a name – it, too, might have been ordered from a shop – and that it wasn't made by LeWitt but by his assistants.

In the demotic phrase of the builder's yard, Wall Drawing #918was contracted out, and looks it. Changing attitudes towards colour in the 20th century aresummed up by a sequence of three German artists.

In the Bauhaus of the1930s, Josef Albers painted squares of Masonite, the chipboard of its day, insub-squares of overlapping colours. The beauty Albers sought was of systematisation, a literally chromatic scale to match a musical one. Forty years later, Gerhard Richter up-ended Albers' thinking by painting pictures that didn't just look like colour charts but actually were.

Works such as 1025 Colours are precisely what they claim to be: deadpan recreations of Pantone sheets, a self-referring self-advertisement. Twenty years on from Richter, Katharina Fritsch's Eight Paintings in Eight Colours (1991)shows the impossible position Richter had left her in. If you're a chromatic painter, where do you go from 1025Colours?

Fritsch's answer, a snapshot of art in the 1990s, is to turn the question into a game by putting single hues in big, academy frames”

ColourChart is that engaging thing, a show that takes something familiar and, by focussing on it, makes you see it afresh. By all means go.TateLiverpool (0151-702 7400) to 13 Sep

Mark Rothko: "Silence is so accurate" a tribute by Paul Rolans

Here is another video of my work regarding color,form and space. This time I  pay tribute to the great Mark Rothko.
I have collected some information about what he and others said and wrote about his art,especially that of his late period..

In 1936, Rothko began writing a book, never completed, about similarities in the art of children and the work of modern painters." In this manuscript, he observed that "the fact that one usually begins with drawing is already academic. We start with color." Read more.

Rothko was using fields of color in his aquarelles and city scenes, and his subject matter and form at this time had become non-intellectual.

Fearing that modern American painting had reached a conceptual dead end, Rothko was intent upon exploring subjects other than urban and natural scenes. He sought subjects that would complement his growing concern with form, space, and color.

Rothko, in the middle of a crucial period of transition, had been impressed by Clyfford Still's abstract fields of color, which were influenced in part by the landscapes of Still's native North Dakota ,He described his new method as "unknown adventures in an unknown space", free from "direct association with any particular, and the passion of organism".

It was at some point during the winter of 1948 that Rothko happened upon the use of symmetrical rectangular blocks of two to three opposing or contrasting, yet complementary, colors, in which, for example, "the rectangles sometimes seem barely to coalesce out of the ground, concentrations of its substance. Additionally, for the next seven years, Rothko painted in oil only on large canvases with vertical formats. Very large-scale designs were used in order to overwhelm the viewer, or, in Rothko's words, to make the viewer feel "enveloped within" the painting

In 1949, Rothko became fascinated by Matisse's Red Studio, acquired by the Museum of Modern Art that year. He later credited it as a key source of inspiration for his later abstract paintings.

In these paintings, color and structure are inseparable: the forms themselves consist of color alone, and their translucency establishes a layered depth that complements and vastly enriches the vertical architecture of the composition. Variations in saturation and tone as well as hue evoke an elusive yet almost palpable realm of shallow space. Color, structure, and space combine to create a unique presence. In this respect, Rothko stated that the large scale of these canvases was intended to contain or envelop the viewer--not to be "grandiose," but "intimate and human." Read more.

Rothko's art reveals a distinct and personal interpretation of the abstract expressionist style. From his first emergence as a mature artist, he eschewed the gestural brushwork and the dense, painterly surfaces that became celebrated in the work of De Kooning, Franz Kline, and others. Instead, Rothko concentrated on expression through color alone, and to this end he radically simplified his imagery. In his best paintings, the imagery consists of two or three rectangles of color that float within an abstract space. Generally, the areas of color dissolve softly into one another, denying all traces of either hard or tactile edges. The softness is a function of the artist's delicate, feathery brushstrokes, and it results in an expanding pictorial space that seems to consist of pure color rather than colored objects. In many of Rothko's paintings his colors appear to generate their own magical or divine light. Read more.

Sensing the futility of words in describing this decidedly non-verbal aspect of his work, Rothko abandoned all attempts at responding to those that might inquire after its meaning and purpose, stating finally that silence is "so accurate". His paintings' "surfaces are expansive and push outward in all directions, or their surfaces contract and rush inward in all directions. Between these two poles you can find everything I want to say."

For Rothko, color is "merely an instrument". The "multiforms" and the signature paintings are, in essence, the same expression of "basic human emotions", as his surrealistic mythological paintings, albeit in a more pure form.