OSAS - The poetics of concrete art

OSAS - The poetics of concrete art
14.06.2018 - 02.09.2018
Opening: 13.09.2018 18:00

artists:
Levente Bálványos, Gábor Erdély, Eric Kressnig, Bertalan Varga, Mar Vicente, Regina Zachhalmel,

curator:
Pia Jardí

The term “concrete”, applied to painting and coined in the 1930s, claimed to be radically different from the concept “abstract”, because it didn’t aim to be a sublimation, metaphor or escape from reality. Concrete art wanted to create a new reality.This absolute condition –the plastic creation free from all reference (literary, musically) or character (expressive, introspective) –developed in the course of the century (starting from concrete art) in movements such a the American post-painterly abstraction or European variants based on painting that sometimes showed sensual effects, but was fundamentally rooted in a principle of rationalization of the creative process, such as also underlies the works of the contemporary artists presented in this exhibition.

The artists are no longer interested in the result –stability, proportion, order- seen as something immutable, but in the work’s capacity to show itself in different states, with possible variations and alterations. The heritage of the avant-gardes in the contemporary “concrete” languages appears with ironic twinkle or as ludic experience far removed from any transcendental claim or the grand récit as intended by modernity.