CROSSED
VISION
DING YI + fm3
[Ding Yi Paintings + Sound by fm3]
13
March – 19 April 2004
Gallery Hours:
2:00
- 5:00 pm. Wednesday - Sunday.
Place:
China Art Archives & Warehouse
“Perception always stands in need of universals”, E.H. Gombrich (1972)
The immortality
of Art is negotiated on the ground of suspicion. The utopia of the ontological
search for Truth, as a supply in the pacification process between the
eye and the symbol/the word and the object, positions art in an intra-world
of views constructed upon approximation, between reality and perception,
substance and sensation, the discursive and the figural, in a constant
denial of the dictatorship of the Sensible as the absolute site of the
Visible: a space that since Plato has been cast in shadow and validated
with hesitation and scepticism as a depletion of “being”, of “existing”.
The visible turned into a screen of appearances, a bi-dimensional resemblance,
a “noise covering a voice”(1). The visible
– to use Lyotard’s words – is immersed in paganism which makes it audible,
readable, intelligible(2).
Armed with such a diffidence art’s research alphabetizes space by means
of an ever-reformulating linguistic experience: in attempt to locate the
finding of truth beyond the geography of cognition (i.e. signification),
and being erected upon superimposed coordinates of perception, disjoined
from tactual-kinetic memories as pre-conceptualized by our visual experience,
it acquires a capability of spatial manifestation which is incessantly
vacillating.
This space is a diffused area, a labile and diacritical one, flimsily
obfuscated at its borders. Thinking and seeing contend here their respective
priorities within the hierarchy of knowledge, in their undertaking to
hold the absolute (the invariant) interwoven in the diversity of the real;
that real which rises and dies behind any light modulation or prospective
movement, in a perpetual retreat of those chivalrous minuets confronting
colour and shape – seeing material.
The act of seeing is indeed one of caution, of awe of the absolute. The
eye relies on a point to decode the “being there” (the view) of a determined
passage of the real, where lights and forms become object of an unaltered
“sight” which things are owed to.
Common practice for perception is in fact that of considering itself a
categorization into universals, constants. The act of recognizing reality
portions moves along a principle of discard of the dissimilar, of the
accidental v/s primary, that is to say what departs form the rule, triggering
a deconstruction of those variants which, once interiorized as such, are
returning the immovable bone structure of the considered identity to our
cognitive capacity.
This attitude is explicated as the proposition of dressing the real with
a mash of essential directrixes where “lights and shadows” are receptacles
of perceptive absoluteness and formulate the real by additive or subtractive
synthesis/combination.
This dialectic, which has been battled for centuries for the dominium
between form and colour, can be assimilated as a dramatic and passionate
reading of history (a cultural or individual one): a consecutive succession
of events or a metaphysical simultaneity of possibilities, of world views,
of crossed visions.
The reality that we dramatically try to “see” moves and evidences over
chromatic categories that willpower tries to visualize as phenomena. In
this consideration art (like ascesis) becomes the place where reality
leaves in the form of the platonic idea (Schopenhauer): in contemplating
the Universal man doesn’t want anymore, but is gratified by the idea,
insofar opposing the precarious and castled fixity of the coordinates
of sensible vision.
The history of abstractionism and cubism whimsically returns to this endeavour
of rendering the essence of reality as to an unrestrainable will to know
the “ends” of things, to prove that “all transformations involve synthesis,
a virtual genetic wedding of polarities that must be present before the
activity can take place”(3).
The lean geometry of the laws of symmetry, good continuation and proximity
as particular rules of reality organization (as extracted in gestaltic
theories) hints to the inextinguishable aspiration to get rid of the redundancy
of space, of the third dimension, of the volumetric fat envisioning a
world where everything is in action and nothing is potential.
This reminds us of our implacable desire for life, for conservation, in
the expansion of what there is not in what there is. An assault to the
reason which is synthesized in the Canons of Zhuangzi, as expressed by
the YouWu 有无 (there is what there is not).
Within such procedures of perceptions dogmatization (specifically in visual
arts) the problem of the search for truth and thus of the delimitation
of false, turns incidental in the acceptance of a vedutism described on
dilated levels of reality, intersected, overlaid and lacerated by the
violence of the “listening eye”.
The struggle fought by art in trying to sort the arbitrariness of view
points in order to get back to one immanent to things, stresses the fact
that it is necessary to learn which among the myriad of possible expressions
is there “to elude the eye (to capture it) and which one is there to make
it immeasurable, to make it see the invisible”(4).
Inhibited by the corporeal sense of Reason and the consecutiveness of
logical process counter pointing the immediacy of the soul, this effort
that
the eye cannot defeat while scanning the forms of reality, is realized
and sublimated in the orchestration of a sound alphabet and a colour harmony
as illustrated by Kandinskij. Music as a consecutive art (meaning developed
and acquired via time articulation) carries away in a romantic sense of
accretion of the spirit, of enlargement of the Self radiating off from
the time axis; centripetal and centrifugal forces are attributed to the
original chromatic dualism of cold (blue) and warm (yellow), white is
the colour of silence, but of a musical one where sound is all around,
and where black is the echo of an obstinate bass.(5)
Noise like the pure form of colour is undetainable, it cannot find in
our mind a fictitious (sensible) constant able to block the invasion of
the world into our mental sight.
Any knowledge - says Ding Yi - requires a period of interiorization, of
mental digestion: in this way the matter that flows on the canvas coming
from the spirit is the product of an ataractic balance of powers, of thoughts
finding their equilibrium within repetition, in simplification and free-hand
exactness.
Literati painting and minimalism encounter here on the playfield of continuity:
it is the copy, the reiteration charged with an imperceptible inner touch,
indistinguishable but present, a brushed point where a whole system of
views, a personal cosmogony, is concentrated.
The recurrence of the crossed pattern intrinsically embodies the cumbersome
forces of tractions and releases, and at the same time it neutralizes
them in their ensemble view. The crosses of Ding Yi space out on the surface
of reality, they reproduce a visible which is not constrained within the
borders of reality, but universalized in a creation of mono-dimensional
revelations as conquered by an absolute sight.
The essential structure of multiplicity, whose portrayal condemns art
to immortality in the aspiration to immobilize it and make it own, casts
a spiritualism typically symptomatic of our age, of an epoch of space
voicing, of place timing.
The void exists in our ear as a visual presence of noise; the visible
of contemporaneity is curtailed with absences and engulfed of presences
in accelerated mutation to such an extent that it compels us to the research
of hermetical, simplified, metaphysical semiotics, on which basis we can
orientate without feeling lacerated by a world that diminishes and dilates
at any moment as the mind is moving therein.
In this post-representative era, by effect of scientific/technological
progress, space planning is formulated by indexical images: in this sense
the human power of prevision and control on the dwelling dominium multiplies
us in a interminable sequence of presences, it is capable to relocate
individuals simultaneously in the past and in the future, annihilating
the pauses whereas motion ceases to be functionally fundamental.
Virtuality condemns to immortality, it deprives us of the pause, caging
us between the bewilderment of our thoughts and the terror of our eyes.
The post-modern necessity to solve the enigmatic complexity of the universe
by means of an obsessive deconstruction of its components, is the delirium
of the homo faber in search for the almighty, the transcendent. God is
the lord of space, the artist that of time.(6)
Man created art to let the space speak, to give it a voice accompanying
his wake until the revelation of the infinite, letting it be a chant based
on a repetition in search for a static central tone, where space is turned
into a P?rtian tintinnabulation, an harmonic timelessness of tractions
and pushes.
Beatrice Leanza
Beijing, Marzo 2004
(1)J.-F.
Lyotard, “Il Partito Preso del Figurale”, in Discorso, Figura (Discours,
Figural), (trad. by) E.Franzini e F.Mariani Zini, Unicopoli, Milano, 1988,
pp.35-47.
(2)Ibid.
(3)Lucy
L. Lippard, “The Structures, The Structures and The Wall Drawings, The
Structures and The Wall Drawings and the Books”, in Sol Lewitt, The Museum
of Modern Art, New York, 1978, pag. 23.
(4)Lyotard, op.cit.
(5)Manlio Brusatin, La Storia del Colore
(The History of Colour), Einaudi Ed., Torino, 1999, pag. 106-107.
(6)Achille
Bonito Oliva, “Il Nome della Voce” (The Name of The Voice), in Gratis
a Bordo dell’Arte , Skira ed., Milano, 2000, pag. 121.