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070211: Galerie Ruzicska Francoise Morellet
Galerie Ruzicska
Francoise Morellet
22.1.11 until 5.3.11
The esprit of geometry
If someone has not climbed very high, he will naturally not fall abysmally low. In matters concerning careers, art, and market for example. The art of minimal form - with its maximum image effect, and how concrete art and its transatlantic sister minimal art stood up against us in the last eight decades - was never the unchallenged leader of international art charts. Too unspectacular and bloodless, apparently far from dramatic and without gestures, never besmirched by ego tricks and manic and diverse trips, more conceived than homemade, too aloof, cool, cold and mellow to meet the taste of the masses. Concrete art was, and is, art for and by a selective group of insiders, a more or less elite clique of experts.
Francois Morellet is one of these artists who never really belonged to the “concrete ones” in their “slippers written in lower case” (G. Grass). In yet another year of special birthdays and anniversaries, the grand seigneur of French contemporary art is more or less enthusiastically welcomed on the eve before the great retrospective at the Centre George Pompidou in Nikolaus Ruzicska’s gallery in Salzburg with an overview of selected works spanning the last 25 years.
In a show, in which Morellet turns out to be an entrepreneur of simple forms, as a virtuoso juggler on the terrain of a geometric-systematic art and whose sometimes too serious dogmas are extended by the always readable spirals of humor. His typical esprit flares up in an absolutely “snide humor”-free zone, which positions the liberal, yet mannered play with elements, the festive ado of the elegant gallantries, closer to rococo-like etiquette and noblesse.
Discretely behind closed doors of precisely set-out forms, such as the eight-fold broken arch of the circle, the barely suppressed smirk of geometry (about itself?) can be heard. And the neon works created in the last years let their souls drift into the warmth of the exhibition space.
But the truly exquisite parts of this exhibition are the specially conceptualized and realized “defigurations”, based on classic showpieces from Austrian collections. The protagonists of the emphatic or idyllic scenes (by Caravaggio, Waldmüller) are effectively substituted by untreated canvases, covered and thereby extinguished. What remains is the now disclosed secret of composition and construction. Is this the geometry of poetry? Or was it the other way around: “I love the stringency of geometry, but I much prefer to huddle it all up…”.
By Stephan Maier
Galerie Ruzicska
5020 Salzburg, Falstauergasse 12
Tel: +43 662 630 360
Fax: + 43 662 630 60
Email: Salzburg@ruzicska.com
http://www.ruzicska.com
Opening hours: Tue – Fri 10 a.m. – 6 p.m., Sat 10 a.m. – 2 p.m.
Mehr Texte von translated and summarized by: Liz Wollner-Grandville
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070211
Galerie Nikolaus Ruzicska
5020 Salzburg, Faistauergasse 12
Tel: +43 662 630 360, Fax: +43 662 630 60
Email: salzburg@ruzicska.com
http://www.ruzicska.com
Öffnungszeiten: Di-Fr 10-18, Sa 10-14 h
Galerie Nikolaus Ruzicska
5020 Salzburg, Faistauergasse 12
Tel: +43 662 630 360, Fax: +43 662 630 60
Email: salzburg@ruzicska.com
http://www.ruzicska.com
Öffnungszeiten: Di-Fr 10-18, Sa 10-14 h
