UFORA'S IMAGINARY MUSEUM PART 1
Work by Rob Mintz
These paintings on paper encourage a kinesthetic response of tactile and motor sensations — along with an art-historical decoding of the faktur. A direct appeal to the physiology of perception itself (nothing less) requires optic agitation. I intend for these paintings to radiate an abstract clarity. On a restless surface forms are suspended in unstable equilibrium, ciphers of the universal solitude. Reflecting consciousness in ways nature cannot, jostling shapes become emblematic of a transpersonal realm. Art rebukes petrifaction. The painter’s jouissance is a call for an end to the reign of necessity, the great dream of utopian fantasy. Kierkegaard wrote of “the infinite passion, the absolute venture.” Art will be that or nothing.
My works on paper externalize the drift of subjectivity and autonomous introspection. Often I compose them so they contain many smaller images, having absorbed the situation of exhibition which places one picture next to another in all museums, real or imaginary.
Kandinksy’s “emanation” (an effect of the interplay of contrasts) already implies a metaphysics of art. The multiple panels of comic strips are an ideal surface division for the picture plane. I am inspired by flea-markets, weather-beaten walls embellished with graffiti, and the impromptu art fairs of the favelas. Anonymous graphic traces symbolize the marred moments of an as yet undisciplined happiness. Ciphers of liberation, promulgate the ideal of pure receptivity freed from immediate desire, bearing witness to the great refusal, intransigent and oracular. Futuro-primitive graphisms resemble unformed perceptions preceding cognition. Archival methods meet a desire for oblivion as the need to demonstrate potentially infinite variations satisfies a repetition compulsion, illustrating the truth of Rimbaud’s famous catch-phrase: Je suis un autre. (I am another.) Fragments of writing provoke a rage of erasure creating the substrata for a glowing surface. Drowned in a torrent of deletions, half-glimpsed phrases become talismanic. In a spangled grotto, an inner-landscape of text, hieroglyphs of synesthesia.
UFORA'S IMAGINARY MUSEUM PART 2
Work by Dalibor Polivka
A central idea of these installations and paintings is based on conceptual canceling of preconceived ideas of the various facets of sociocene: colonial adventures, history of church, consecration of power, ideology of beauty, and return to origins.
1. Flags of the province of all mankind. (P.O.A.M.) are imaginary representations of the impossible dream of social and spiritual cohesion without the false values of “totalization.” They contain symbolic conceptual canceling “X” as an allusions to the history of the church. These flags are offered to a colonial adventure of the outer space by sci-fi evangelists.
2. Invisible Dwellings are “museums” without walls. Artificial teepee tent like structures are manifestations of a fake neo-traditional ritual, detached from history, origins, and natural environment. They are a reaction to the shift in function of original dwellings as places for daily living, reduced today to the pretentious ceremonial purposes.
3. Thermal Blankets, the art of survival and the origins of art.
Archaeological evidence shows that our ancestors had the ability to create art much earlier in evolution than is suggested by current knowledge of art-related artifacts. The warmth preserving foil protects the proto-art’s fundamental function of survival - yet to be discovered.
4. Fire pits. Sound installation calling for a return to the origins.
5. Chromium Oxide. The end of artistic tyranny.
Artwork is reduced to a representation of a formal element to limit works expected functions. Exhibiting a formal property and applications of Chromium Oxide, is a way of stripping the artwork of its artistic dress. This reduces the importance of cultural context and allows to manipulate biographical and historic context of a form.