Trials

From a plastic work that its author wants to place in the wake of concrete art, we expect it to be expressed in and through strict rigor.

Traditionally this rigor is of a geometrical order, but also, and in my opinion with more innovative results, it can be based on the universal energies and structures of nature : the full and the empty, the interior and the exterior, the visible and the invisible, the simple and the multiple, finally : on all imaginable contrasts and structures.

For almost three thousand years the dictate of Aristotle had established that art should ’imitate nature’. It was mainly concrete art that eliminated ’mimesis’ through a veritable revolution. But revolutions sometimes risk becoming habits and lose their strength.

To avoid this fate, therefore, a permanent effort is needed to renew the language and eliminate conventions. That’s what I tried to do with ’Rainbow Drops’. We see a set of twelve elements that turn in very slow rotation around themselves. Their movement is on the threshold between the visible and the invisible. The observer is asked to force his visual acuity, which means the penetration of the gaze and the spirit. What nobler function can one think of for a work of art ?

HJ Glattfelder August 2023