“Pure Perception” at Monica De Cardenas, Milan / MOUSSE CONTEMPORARY ART MAGAZINE

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“Pure Perception” at Monica De Cardenas, Milan

May 26~2012

With the exhibition “Pure Perception” Monica De Cardenas Gallery presents new work by four young and acclaimed contemporary artists. The project, curated by Margherita Artoni, sets out to redefine the need for abstraction through an aesthetic itinerary that attempts to bring out the pars construens of the perceptive dimension of the work.

Approaching the concept of “abstraction” today makes us run the risk of seeming to have all-too-widespread and in some ways anachronistic aims. Much has already been conceived and created in this fertile territory, starting with philosophical irrationalism and the first experiments of the Fauves, all the way to the research of recent years. The rise of abstract art has managed to subvert, in the span of over one century, the traditional idea of chromatic intervention, the equilibrium of forms, the role of the artist, granting an utterly new raison d’être to the perception of “beauty”. A “pure” perception, removed from the denotative factor of the image, proudly (re)appropriating those plastic values that actually coincide with the creative root of any artwork: color, space, structure, material. In abstract art, then, the figurative intent is challenged to favor the hypothesis of an “other” language, where the Saussurean dichotomy between signified and signifier tends to flatten on the same semiotic level, forcing the observer to interpret, as well as comprehend, an image of uncertain context. Nevertheless, in spite of appearances, abstract art is not a chaotic tangle that emerges from the simple omission or distortion of the figure. Instead, it is a “primordial soup” with essential properties, from which the artist can draw to develop his or her own expressive code; articolate and coherent, like the less avant-garde productions, but at the same time capable of engaging the two “actors” of the aesthetic experience in a relationship of dialogue, open to infinite changes. To be able to find an authentic sense of contemporary abstract practice, then, we need to start with these premises, abandoning the praise of abstraction seen as rejection of the realistic figure, and trying to redefine the movement in terms of new propositions. This is where the tension between light and color found in the paintings of Kristin Baker, the formal harmony of Laura Owens, the utopias of Mai-Thu Perret and the dialectic between memory and present explored by Amanda Ross-Ho can bear eloquent witness to a conceptual breakthrough whose theoretical foundations lie in the hermeneutic potential of pure perception.

Monica De Cardenas, Milan

until July 28, 2012

Above – Kristin Baker, Current Automation Matter, 2012