CATALOGUES

Majic Window

The extraordinarily normal history

Brian Alfred is an American artist who, while having a well-defined and easily recognised style, tries in every way to experiment with different compositional and technical solutions. In this show too, with its emblematic title Majic Window, paintings, collages, and 3-D animations follow each other in search of stylistic unity. Alfred’s compositional choices and the resulting images are recognisable above all for the evident and necessary three-dimensionality that they display. In fact the artist never makes use of spatial illusions, not even for a moment, in order to fool the viewers or to induce them to shift their attention on to the reality he alludes to. The surfaces of his works are flat, the result of the graphics processing which came about with the earliest digital imaging, a technique that was not yet sufficiently sophisticated to be misleading. And for this very reason it is used by the artist for the capacity of the images to question themselves about art and the mechanisms that govern those ways of communicating images which, by now, are dominant in our post-industrial society.

The roots of his work, then, dig into the territory of Pop Art, and the thought behind it often refers to Andy Warhol’s output. However, if we go even further back in time, these roots might well also be nourished by the surprising images of Ukiyo-e, the famous Japanese prints of the Edo period which were so important for many artists in the nineteenth century. Like these Japanese prints, the works by Brian Alfred often depict landscapes as well as natural elements in their most powerful and allusive actions. This American artist might well have derived from Pop Art the characteristic of analysing our way of representation by way of simple images, ones that are easily reproduced and, as a result, able to enter subtly and lightly into contact with people. (…)

Roberto Pinto

“The Simple Complexity of Forms

In an individual’s life the perception of time is relative because historical, social, and spiritual conditionings are superimposed on it.

For many of us time is short. There is little silence. Often we are fascinated by what is ephemeral, the “here today and gone tomorrow” aspect of inexorable daily life. And art too is bullied by disposable consumerism: in a short time the product, the work, and sadly the artist too, are worn down. There is the need for continual brainwaves which, as such, must be explosive and efficacious.

We will be buried by a laugh – but in the meantime? Strokes of genius risk becoming academic; fun and enjoyable, but academic nonetheless in the worst sense of the term. Anti-conformism at all costs becomes mannerism, the wild search for the amazing. A passing amazement that is consumed as quickly as a glass of fresh water.

When we find ourselves in front of works – quite apart from the means used for them – that induce us, on the contrary, to stop and reflect, then we become aware that perhaps it is these that create a break with the cultural conformism that threatens to level out everything. And this is how it is with the works by Herbert Hamak.

It is difficult to find a definition of his works. Paintings? Sculptures? “I have never thought about sculptural interventions or, in fact, even painterly ones. It is first of all a work concerning colour that then becomes painting and, eventually, sculpture.”1 Exactly: colour in all its purity. It is as though Hamak managed to enclose it in the very definition of it. The fire in his works is the works themselves.

The changes are intimate and subtle: this is why they need long times of perception and observation so that the viewer might be led to silence and meditation. The viewer is induced to go further and discover what lies behind the physical aspect of the object, however complex it might be.

The lengthy time for perception is proportionate to that of the work’s realisation during which the colour seems to grow on itself through gradations and layers. It develops, transforms, mutates, in order to arrive at an identical rapport between density and transparency in which what is all-important is the relation created between the work and the space, whether this is a domestic space or that of a gallery, a museum, or of the great architecture which Hamak has often confronted, as in Castelvecchio, Verona, or the cathedral in Atri, Abruzzo. Here the façade of the building became a kind of musical score scattered over with blue forms. …”

“Part of the evolution of Herbert Hamak’s art has inevitably been towards an increased importance of installations, not pre-planned but created by empirically calibrating the relationship between particular works and the exhibition space. It is as though the possibilities of the physical and emotional allusions created between the varying colours and transparencies of each work could change from installation to installation, much as the transparency of the individual works changes with the changing light.

A recent development of this has been an increased concentration on works in the form of diptychs and triptychs. These are traditional forms used in the past above all for their narrative possibilities: in fact they are book-like and traditionally could even be opened and closed like a book. But for Hamak narration is a far subtler affair: the works narrate themselves to each other and are influenced and changed by this narration, permitting us both to follow this and to be drawn into their discourse.

This does not represent a great change from Hamak’s past or even other contemporary works, but it does allow a closer, more guided investigation of relationships that previously were more casual, as well as of variations of transparency and colour that can now, in this far more intimate and concentrated conversation, permit themselves an even more diaphanous subtlety. With these latest works Hamak creates an almost hypnotic world of delicate relations between the elements which, as with his large-scale ‘installations’, reach out to enter and become part of our own world.”

“Does painting have a body? A body, that is, that does not only bow down under the weight of the material, under the increasing density of paint built up by the passing and passing once more of the gesture, of the paint-loaded brush? And the next question would depend on the (positive) answers to this first one: in other words, if there exists the possibility for an artist to immerse himself and then rise out and up towards the abstract heights of painting’s body, then his problem will not so much be that of realising it in its pondus, its weight, but to realise it universally, ‘absolutely’ as painting. Paradigmatic, synthetic yet never literary, Painting, almost as absent as breath, a continuous breeze, such as that that man still has not felt either here on our planet or from the stars.

At times it is possible to feel the breath of Painting. And, still more impalpable yet not more difficult than following it with the eye, it is possible to see its infinite, multiple and glowing body, and to make it material, to see it.

This could well be more than the experience of those who visit this show, of those who inevitably see its ‘breath’ and ‘body’.

Hamak, ideally and universally, thrusts ‘his hands’ into painting as an absolute essence, almost as though the very sense of the most material kind of painting might happily have found a place as ideal as a perfect and multiple physical body, continually moving and never still (beyond its appearance).

It is in this physical and ideal space that we find all the elements of painting, of the materialisation of a dream that, as such, alters, changes, and is transformed. And if the dream is transformed as a result of memory, its painted form lives and is changed thanks to its two main elements, as well known as they are vibrantly alive: light and the body of colour. …”

"The Quintessence of Formed Form

Luciano Anceschi has written, "Once a work of art has passed from the artist's hand it is present, in front of the viewer or listener, with all its shapes and colours, all its images in sound, its tones and pitches. And in its expression it completely resolves both itself and what it contains. It seems to need nothing, to be happy in its self-sufficiency, to have arrived at calm and stillness. And yet its life has only just begun. In the meanwhile it reclines in silence until it is recognised and accepted. Its meaning finds nothing to refer to and the work is as though closed in expectant isolation. Its symbols seem silenced, its language new and incredible".

When a work of art appears it creates a sense of alienation as well as raising various questions, something this quotation expresses very well. Its presence is neither obvious nor banal; clichés are kept in check. And yet, full of the new meanings that it contains, it bridges a void that is both linguistic and existential. In fact the first condition the work poses is one of language and of seeing, and this is the subsequent condition of everyone else because it is a critical act. You might object that these are generalities valid for any work of art, and yet their coherence favours some artists more than others as is the case, for example, of the work of Herbert Hamak.

When looking at his untitled works, the most notable fact is certainly that they do not 'express' something because they do not have 'something to say'. His works impress because they are strongly structured, rigorous, transparent, and ambiguous entities. The transparency is such as to capture and retain light. The ambiguity lies in the vitreous consistency of the material, a midway point between solid, liquid, and airy. Its inner upheavals and turbulence are changes that have already taken place, the outcome of a process (with all its phases and reactions) of which we are now offered the stable image at an indeterminate point: consolidated and fixed but not ecstatic. …”

Mario Bertoni

Space Like a Breath

Jacob Hashimoto’s work really is a Luxury for the Eye and for visual perception. It could also be defined as a Feast for the Eye, but that would be imposing a limit. Probably you will be asking what the difference is between the two statements. So, a feast is thought out, organised, or it derives from momentary, ephemeral, hedonistic typicality. Luxury for the eye (not to be confused with luxury goods which, recently, have been mistaken for art objects) is difficult to arrive at, like a delicious yet, at the same time, dangerous balance that, once it has revealed itself, must remain so. For ever.

I’ve always loves Jacob’s ability to manoeuvre himself physically, together with his work, through areas and techniques and different methods while maintaining an unvaried coherence which is though, at the same time, variable. His incessant technological action with positives and negatives in his Waterblocks and, with the same concept though manually in this case, in the wall pieces reconfirms his almost paradoxical aim of repeating through variations while never repeating himself.

Working in this way he allows us a Luxury, he creates it for those of us who are viewing a complex space, so concentrated and thought through that it even seems at first sight airy and minimal, happy and carefree. Which, in fact, it isn’t, or at least it isn’t just that. Let’s take these new wall pieces as an example, almost as though using them to construct a possible story on the basis of the work of this artist, a story to be told one step at a time. For some years now monochrome white seems to be at the heart of his large-scale works. Immense white elements make up infinite suspended works. The same colour is used for various works in private collections where the elements or, as some call them, the kites are at a great height and are often seen against a light source which exalts the white purity and a symbolism that is as luminous as it is abstract. White too are the flowering spheres of his artificial and ironic Trees and so are the elements of Microbursting Thunderhead where light was the effective, electrical part of the sculpture itself. And so too are certain apparently monochrome new white wall-pieces and, in order to define them better, I would like to write that they are “anchored to the walls”, almost as though they were trying to give rhythm and order to the high points and threads that have the precise task of “anchoring these extraordinary cloudlike apparitions” to a portion of the wall and to its airy protrusion into space. …”

In art as in music repetition is a dangerous procedure: it often seems that there is no reason why a work should ever end while wishing that it would. But sequences were used by many baroque composers to create fascinating structures and are, in fact, still as much a part of classical as of popular music.

And sequences, small phrases repeated at varying pitches, might be kept in mind when considering the recent and past art of Jacob Hashimoto, for a creative use of them is never simple repetition but variation. In his ‘ceiling’ pieces hundreds and hundreds of identical kites were suspended to create grand masses, and here it was the different heights of the kites that created the variation. In some of his recent work, instead, he has flattened his assemblage of elements against the wall, and here it is the elements that vary in size, colour, and also at times in material, though they are ranked uniformly in length and distance from the wall. Their three-dimensionality has been compressed in comparison with other aspects of his output, but the myriad coloured elements now often playfully contradict the works’ shallow space. Physically we can see how far from the wall they are, but a step back and the space seems shaken up, small bright shapes leap outwards while others retire and visually seem to be behind the wall itself. The sequential elements give the works their undeniable stability, their monumentality even, but the dappled colours and tiny forms are what add movement, life, and creative ambiguity.

Space... is formed, traveled through, and heard. He suspends in order to meditate, he maneuvers those full/ empty paradoxical masses and, in a contemporary poem, imprisons water, light, geometry, pattern or ‘landscape’, and makes them sing together. It is as though in man’s experience nature is materialized both positively and negatively. The parts do not negate each other but interpenetrate and have the same source: they fascinate each other. And this happens in anything but a superficial way: it is the result of great curiosity, as though the eye had become a detective and the act of making simply a way of embodying these endless yet exact inquiries. Jacob reflects on the multiple essence of concretizing space, as though in his mind he had found a measurement-molecule fascinated by space and which wanted to materialize it, make it useable and visible but without overdoing it, without arriving at a heavy sense of realism. It is this extraordinary and at times (as we shall see) dangerous fascination that almost literally attacks you on entering one of his shows. Suddenly you find yourself among hundreds or thousands of units, fragments completed to form a whole, suspended marks that distribute themselves in space and form it, giving it new life rather than occupying it. And there you are, amazed and transfixed, virtually suspended yourself, counting and visually journeying through these materials (which in the past have been silk, paper, fabric) and these thousands of threads that hold up and make possible this new world ... And this is the first, elementary phase.

And then a kind of revelation makes you abandon resistance: there is no longer any decoration, any manual virtuosity or mathematical repetition, there is just the work that draws itself together, breathes, moves, and allows you to respire in another way: with the eyes, here in this room. An absolute variable is what Jacob’s past installations categorically recall.

For some years I have literally spied on his work on the few occasions I’ve been able to see it in Italy. At times I’ve experienced it briefly, at others with an almost indecent stare, almost obsessively analytical, searching every detail, each knot, link, bamboo spill, stitch or whatever. Then I allowed the images to sediment in time and, late one morning in Verona, he and I met and got to know each other without talking about the work, listening to the music he plays while hanging his show and ... Without any taping, we chatted civilly using as our excuse for talking the waters of the river Adige running nearby. … “

Jacob Hashimoto Through European Eyes

Jacob Hashimoto's work is marked by two geographical parameters: Japan, where his father’s family came from, and Los Angeles where he lives and works. These two such apparently distant points have, in time, drawn closer together, both as a result of improved transport and, above all, because of the Pacific Ocean that links them. This has led to the increasing mixture of peoples and to the close relations between the two cultures. Nowadays there are many maps in existence that place the Pacific at the center of the world and thus underline the relationship between the two neighboring coasts.

For a European it is difficult to resist the temptation to see in Hashimoto's work an example of this link. From the Japanese side he inherits a deliberate and precise method of working, almost inconceivable for a European, one capable of creating 3000 circles of silk, each 18 centimeters in diameter, which are then suspended by threads in an airy mass that seems to descend from the heavens. For some time, in fact, Hashimoto has been making tiny kites of paper or other flexible materials held together by wooden struts and twine and then assembled in a conceptually simple but practically elaborate method.

What is now on show in Verona is the most recent evolution of a work that aims at occupying space without either the heaviness of sculpture or a reduction to a simple play of light. It is part of a tradition of complexity resolved into simplicity that is to be found as much in a fugue by Bach as in recent minimalist music. …”

When Colour Guides Form

Notes on David Lindberg’s work
by Angela Madesani

David Lindberg’s work gives a fascinating and stimulating answer to the problems of today’s non-figurative painting - if, that is, such a definition and the attempt to collocate it within some thematic group still has any sense. In fact, what would be of far more interest would be to compare it to contemporary art as a whole, as a single large category that includes temporal and social questions, something that has been pointed out on various occasions by the French art sociologist Nathalie Heinich.

It is fascinating to see the working methods employed by Lindberg, an American who lives in the Netherlands, as much in order to discover his secrets and tricks as for revealing an attitude that refers back to that of artists of antiquity, even to the recipes of the fourteenth century writer of treatises Cennino Cennini. For his work the artist uses foam rubber, epoxy resins(1), glass fibre, oil paints, and pigments.

These materials are easily modelled, ductile, and they allow direct working with the hands and with non-professional and ready-to-hand tools: small knives, screwdrivers, awls. He has, in every sense, a hands-on relationship with these which alludes to craftwork. Attracted by the possibility of changing aim through his use of materials, Lindberg explores his instruments again and again: those he uses are usually employed for making models, surfboards, boats, and aeroplane parts.

This is the reason why any interpretation of the work must change during its making: usually the works are horizontal while they are being made and are then hung vertically. Tension derives from the fact that the three-dimensional aspect, through the combination of light and colour, alludes to the TV screen where the image is in movement. Lindberg’s aim is to enter into colour and its flux. With regard to this we should remember those works in which he used coloured mirrors placed at the end of cylinders where the colours of the painting are reflected.

His works do not result from any initial plan; Lindberg is inspired and deeply influenced by the nature of his materials. Most often it is the colour which creates the form. He avoids having control over everything and he allows colour to spread according to physical principles. He might indicate guiding lines but there is always an unpredictable aspect which has to be taken into account. Each work by him contains in itself the solution to a series of problems that cropped up during the working phase. Through this aspect there then bloom poetic, emotive elements that find a perfectly harmonious balance within the work. His is, therefore, an attempt to dissect and, therefore, to find solutions to the complexities that have arisen. (…)

1 Lindberg is fascinated by the slow time which resin takes to harden and its free spreading over the surface, a result of molecular force.

“The Mountain That Isn’t There

Siegfried Kracauer underlined it : “Photographers must in any case reproduce the objects in front of them and they have no freedom at all; the privilege of artists, instead, is that of arranging existing forms and their relative spatial relationships according to their interior vision”. And yet even the photography of Hiroyuki Masuyama seems, at first sight, a passive reproduction of reality. Like the married couple Bernd and Hilla Becker (teachers at the Düsseldorf art school, the city where Masuyama has his studio) he gives the impression of using his means in the simplest way, without the use of particular lenses and without searching for specific framing effects. Paradoxically, it actually seems that what controls his way of photographing is the nature itself of the element being reproduced: otherwise how could we explain the obsessive, methodical photographing, month after month, years even, of parks, rooms, and landscapes?

But it is in this very persistence of the object - almost to the point of touching and entering into a close relationship with it, -that Masuyama’s eye goes beyond pure and simple data to discover an enigmatic rapport that transcends it: that inherent latent symbolic network, that halo of possible dimensions surrounding and overarching it. It is sufficient to observe the multiplicity of shots that record one of the many journeys made by the artist (e.g. from Frankfurt to Tokyo, London to Tokyo, Miami to Anchorage) in order to become aware that the passing of time coincides with its length, that the duration of the hours is tied to a place and, therefore, to standing still in time. And this fixity/moving duality in some way eliminates any kind of “reality principle”. We no longer see a fact but an event caught in its development, on the very cusp of what our mind already knows and what is still unknown.

It is obvious that to achieve all this Masuyama is obliged to make use of digital modification that adds, subtracts, changes, and retouches until a complete superimposition of the external landscape (what is known) and the internal landscape (what is imaginary, unknown) is arrived at. …”

“Photographic representation has often been thought of as a re-presentation (or reproduction) of what exists, the testimony of some objective datum. But even when it can seem a chilly, almost petrified record of the world, it always ends up showing us a new world, a never previously seen view. It never captures reality in itself, but only suggests a part, a section: that point of view that corresponds to the photographer’s eye and to its inevitable individuality. And so each image becomes the world of the photographer himself and not in any way a means by way of which he might understand what he saw in front of him. Susan Sontag has also underlined this: ‘Photographs cannot explain anything’. But perhaps it is just as a result of this that they are transformed into ‘inexhaustible invitations to deduction, to speculation and imagination’.

It can be taken for granted that this kind of photography does not produce an invented image but re-invents the subject in hand, reformulating it in the form of an image, in an evocative simulacrum. So much so that each act of duplication also means an act of re-creation, as happened with the photographer in Antonioni’s Blow-up who, like an alchemist, produced and reproduced in his studio an infinite series of prints, knowing well that ‘under the revealed image there is another still more faithful to reality, and underneath this there is another (…). And so on as far as the real image of that absolute, mysterious image that no one will ever see.

Well then, Hiroyuki Masuyama’s lightbox Flowers (which could be considered as a kind of symbol of the whole exhibition) seems to make use of this double shift: on the one hand there is a move towards explosion, to the forward breakthrough of the image, and, on the other, towards its implosion, its absorption into a grid of dots leaving a trace of particular visual peculiarities. It is a passage from maximum vision to seeing nothing, an attempt at seeing the invisible or, at least, at alluding to it. In showing the festive yet banal scene of a field, Masuyama apparently enacts something that cannot be represented (or that is incommensurable), like the magnet spoken of by Tarkovsky which, in its essence as a field of force, is concealed behind an obvious reproduction of a piece of iron. Except that Masuyama shoots some 400 frames of his subject, then puts them together digitally, alternating the shots of night and day. So the image is no longer the evidence of a single view but of many concentrated views mixed together. The image is not the confirmation of some objective reality but creates a potential, complex, plural reality. It does not limit itself to comprehending the secret identity of a place, but individuates its otherness by way of an unprecedented union of being and becoming (or also of act and potential). …”

AFTER

When the Past becomes Present

The history of images has always been concerned with U-turns, survivals, and recuperations. The past has never stopped hounding the present. Walter Benjamin wrote, “The relationship between what has already happened and the here-and-now is a dialectic one”: this is not a steady course but a discontinuous, organised, progressive fact. It is knowledge in movement, a reappearance in time of the relevance of the present similar to that of an unhappy ghost, a “revenant” still full of potential.

This is rather how Timothy Tompkins perceives and deals with reality (the here-and-now) with all its social, personal, and cultural questions; he does so by holding on to the force that comes from the tradition of images. After Friedrich, After Corot, After Turner, After Latour etc. are not, then, a simple inventory or a mere quotation of figures taken from art history, but a rediscovery of the very roots of painting, the intrinsic sources of working. In other words, Tompkins is interested in memory as a process and not as a result; as “controversies of memory” and not as “remembered fact”. We are far distant from the solid, carefully nurtured supremacy that historical positivism uses to fuel the objects of its knowledge: for the historian we are dealing with objects from the past; Tompkins, instead, deals with objects (or images) that continue to pass by and that generate new objects for knowledge.

But there is another question that seems to involve the whole range of this Californian artist’s work, and this is the conviction that the time we live in is not necessarily that which we know best, that chronological contiguity really does not illuminate things and facts with the light of familiarity. He gives the impression of doubting that the nearer we are, the greater the understanding, and that to keep his eye fixed on his own time means inevitably to perceive and grasp it better in all its aspects. He prefers to take up a position that has in itself a kind of disconnectedness and displacement with respect to topicality. (…)

Luigi Meneghelli