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do Comercio (24 Nov 1999 - 31 May 2000) |
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Dusan Dzamonja presents to the people of Lisbon his sculpture, in which work and reflection on the plastic sign constitutes a program of work, perhaps in continuation of a line of inquiry initiated in the 30¹s by and pursued in subsequent decades by the gestural painters of the New York school and the French informalists, It is to that family, though exploring three-dimensional, that the sculptor's recent work and some of his earlier pieces belong. In some ways the act of talking the gestural image and transposing it into three-dimensional space constitutes a remarkable experiment, inspired by a fascination with the ideographic writing of China and Japan.If parallels may be drawn between this sculpture and contemporary endeavor in the field of painting, the work of Pierre Soulages immediately springs to mind. Both artists work with the plastic sign, making it the theme and program of their work, striving to Went a "writing" of their own that in turn exalts the sign. In the case of Dusan Dzamonja, the sign is isolated in a resistant material. It is in this material that the artist imprints the marks of iron chain, as if to emphasize his directional intent. The very substance of the sculpture seems to refer back to pictographic writing, in which energy must be retained and released with the highest degree of control. It is this expression of energy in a gesture that is unique, or nearly so, that constitutes the aft of calligraphy; it is the relationship between the gesture and the energy channeled by artists', that auscultation of the energies that exist in each of us. that explains this fascination with the plastic sign. At a time when the surrealist legacy was to the fore and the process of discovering the mechanisms of the psyche remained a priority, falling in love with the sign made perfect sense. We may recall the words of the pointer and poet Henri Mchaux: ³I too went to Japan. In Japan, to be unable to create meaning with signs, with graphic signs, is a kind of infirmity. I arrived and I departed again. Shock and shame in Japan. But it was Chinese painting that entered deeply into me, that made a convert of me. No sooner did I see it that I was definitively enthralled by the world of signs and lines. The preference for the far off over the near at band, for the poetry of incompleteness over the tidy account, the copy; the bold strokes, leaping as if seized by the motion of a sudden inspiration, not traced prosaically, exhaustively, functionally: that is what spoke to me, grabbed hold of me, carried me away. This time, painting had won the argument.[1] In his most recent phase, it is as if Dusan Dzamonja¹s aim were to render the sign graphically explicit, to draw it with a clean outline, like a graphic design in which rigor and definition are essential. From a documentary survey of the artist¹s career thus far, and with the caveats imposed by a somewhat incomplete familiarity with his oeuvre, it could be said that his recent tendency is towards greater purification and play with clear-cut profiles. On their monumental scale, the sculptures are objects of great discipline and visual impact. Certainly they are in a league apart. from the hundreds and hundreds of works of public art whose origins lie in poorly applied arts patronage legislation or the whims of town planning, works that do little to dignify contemporary sculpture and in many cases pollute the urban environment. Dzamonja¹s works need space to be shown and, following on from Botero's exhibition, our Terreiro do Paço is an ideal site. After the Place Vendôme and the success of that experiment, which inspired an excellent commentary by the critic Pierre Restany, the people of Lisbon have the opportunity to enjoy the work of an artist who bas specialized in public and urban art. In Restany's words, Dzamonja is the "urban space's ideal man, at once its geometrical, its street entertainer and its poet[2] In spite of the different scales of the squares - Place Vendôme and Terreiro do Paço - the works imprint the surrounding spaces with their own profile, by means of their artistic quality. This is certainly the case of this sculptor, whose name is one of the most significant of contemporary sculpture in Europe. Sílvia Chicó July 1999 [1] In Henri Michaux: "Emergeances - Résurgeance", ed. Sentiers de la Création, Skira, 1972 [2] In Catálogo: "Dzamonja - Place Vendôme", ed. Park Sculptura Dzamonja Vrsar / Mairie de Paris, 1998 |
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