Specificity
Denise Carvalho
p>In a time when
our conception of history is not only non-linear and multidimensional but also
simulated and sensational, the notion of a movement or a style or a school is
certainly obsolete. One might have to accept that the authenticity and rationale
of prior histories led to how we envision the art of today.
“Specificity”
can be interpreted as a universal moment in any history in which artists of similar
verve and depth find singularity in aesthetic form. More to the point, specificity
can be understood as the moment when artists find the universal language of form
within a particular situation, or even the particularity and singularity of an
expression and concept within a universally established form. The true art appreciator
will also find another expression in works that contain specificity: a language
of individuality. Specificity is individuality as the utmost proposition of art.
It is through the solidarity of a movement that art makes progress toward changing
the world, but it is by finding individuality that art recreates itself. Specificity
as an aesthetic mark can be found in the simple integration between form and
idea.
For Stanley Whitney,
specificity can be constructed by the most essential geometric forms such as
the square or the rectangle.
While Whitney reduces
the number of shapes to squares or lines, he expands their chromatic relational
possibilities.
Deconstruction
of the grid may be suggested in the original concept, but the result is free
from any illusionist references to what is real. By building his concept purely
as form, he finds its integration with the concept, and by focusing on this integration
as a whole, he finds them again separate and independent. For example, in Here
and There (2001), contrasting colors determine the individuality of each square,
though the row where these squares are placed remains autonomous from the system
of the other rows. The idea is that each form is contained within a larger system
while also floating in its own independent and interdependent universe.
Whitney starts
from a changing perception of form to determine what is specific, while John
Tremblay’s large acrylic paintings begin with a fixed notion of elemental
form to determine specificity as an interplay of multirelational potentialities.
Tremblay’s fluid geometric shapes, seemingly alive on the two-dimensional
plane, create multirelational perspectives, pointing to an ever-changing position
of the viewer. It is through these multiple visual capabilities that a physical
reality is assumed. The illusory visual worlds become real in the aesthetic frame.
As any other theoretical method, they are created as abstract tools of thought.
Tremblay’s work questions optical limitations of space in relation to time.
This is how semi-geometric, semi-organic shapes create an allusion to the space
from which they originate. They are determined by optical illusion but they are
also simply lines and colors. They are both background and foreground, alluding
to advancing and receding movements, to a sense of stasis and motion. This is
the kind of specificity that Tremblay’s paintings require: one that encompasses
multiple optical perceptions.
Multiple perceptions
are part of the process in which color becomes form in the large paintings of
Wojciech Lazarczyk. Lazarczyk’s work points to suprematism and neoplasticism,
but his non-objective paintings are rather personal and immediate, focusing more
on their own self-referentiality than on the derivation from other art forms
in history. Color theory, for Lazarczyk, is born out of an organic interweaving
of brush stroke after brush stroke, pigment over pigment, continuously applied
on the canvas. The result is a paradox of color depths and an apparent flatness.
Whereas these monochromes of color appear flat, they are a system of passages
in which water and pigment slowly build in depth. So, instead of looking like
flat and thick surface, these colors appear extremely thin and deep. Certainly,
similar visual effects have appeared in both constructivist art in Europe and
Russia and in minimal art in the United States, but what is ultimately innovative
is the subjective intensity of one’s experience of art in any period and
at all levels of creative departure.
Though Lazarczyk’s
large spaces of color can evoke a sense of permanence and absoluteness, his process
is always immediate and particular. His work is totally self-contained, therefore
creating exactly the opposite effect on the viewer: a sense of distance. His
large horizontal or vertical expanses of color can be perceived as both illusive
dreamscapes or completely synthetic determinations of time and space. Nevertheless,
it is the specificity of color as form that sustains the importance of the particular
within the universal.
Doug Harvey’s
work mixes everything from paint to peanuts to foam, from painting to installation
to sound. Things find their way to consensus no matter how different they seem.
Aware of the inevitability of consensus, Harvey pushes his ideas toward its polar
opposite. Each of Harvey’s materials is specifically and intentionally chosen
purely for its physical and metaphysical potentialities. However, the overall
consensus in his work is always speculative. Beyond each of his abstracted painted
depictions there perhaps lies a story, perhaps not. The state of wonder this
provokes is ironically associated with a sense of loss. Doug Harvey brings into
his frame an abundance of visual possibilities, without mapping their relationships
or locating them within a specific story. His work carries out a sense of detachment
from any historical background, and has no specific reference to any other style
or iconography. It intends exactly the opposite: to ramify all possible ends,
and to distance art from a determinate point. The innumerable possibilities in
his art’s departure allow it to create a consensus and closure within itself.
This ironic movement of art as an end in itself is also an indicator of a sense
of time that is always present. The specificity of a constantly present time
in Harvey’s work is both humorous and tragic.
That brings us
back to the intention of the artist toward the object. Rina Banerjee’s sculptural
installations are intended as fragments of the near and far.
Although here everything
becomes universally connected, certain aspects of an object remain unique in
the overall generality. This process is also reverted.
In her exhibition
Antenna, for example, an industrial object such as an umbrella can create diasporic
relationships when assembled together with other more organically looking materials.
