Page 17 - Attila Konnyu

“WHAT WE CALL REALITY,
WITH WHAT WE DO NOT SEE, BECOMES VISIBLE THROUGH ART
reality is just a starting point. The structure is painted here what is hang on this structure is a landscape. Painting is simultaneously non-representational and representational. Cezanne reveals every stroke, he does not paint the detail because it is unimportant, he wants to stress its irrelevance. He paints the structure behind the object/place that is a starting point. He nds it interesting and astonishing, craft of copying is irrelevant. Since the discovery of photography it is not interesting anyway and Plato’s argument of no need for making copy of the substantive/ideal con rms this notion. Cezanne does this so the viewer has the opportunity to remake the canvas and has the same aesthetic experience of discovery of the structure.
(Painting of structure in color patch formula was later made obvious by the Cubists. Picasso uses structure in order to show all planes simultaneously. If the third dimension is depth, forth is the time.) Here a comparison must be made to serious music and its exploration of the variations on the same theme. If we listen, for one example to Smetana’s ‘My country’, the astonishment we can feel by nding all the possibilities, the aesthetic experience we can feel. Only in a painting we can see these all at the same time, not in the time sequence. With Cezanne painting becomes more autonomous. It becomes a painting before it would be anything else. Yet Picasso still remains running into a viewer who is screaming: “This is not my grandmother!”
How does Cezanne achieve all this? He attens the canvas - there is no trace of shading, no intention of three- dimensionality, he eliminates detail so the viewer does not rush into a narrative. This way he shows that the subject is subordinated. With this he moves towards abstraction. He limits number of colors in order to make the viewer start to think about the color itself. With this automatically he shows again the subordination of object. He achieves giving us an aesthetic experience that artist has when
making a canvas, (later on we base “Art in Order to Leave Art” on this notion) where before the viewer saw mostly the craft of making a copy of an object, a likeness of it and not the painting in its complexity and autonomy. There is a dialogue between the viewer and the canvas created. The un nished look of the canvas gives an opportunity for completion in viewer’s mind. The artist has the ability to see the environment simultaneously and differentiate the complex. He helps us to see this by his work. He identi es the essence of the landscape and paints it following Aristotle’s argument to draw the ideal essential characteristics of the environment so we can nd the ideal in them. The artist’s talent is in his ability to recognize the principal characteristics of an object and reduce this one to them. He strips the painting of everything unimportant. We call this the reductionist formula. He invents structure so we can see greater nuance. While he explores the nuances of the color, he demands greater complexity. The aesthetic emotions that we are made to feel are doubled, because of the inter-subjectivity, again we have extreme emotions as we reconstruct the canvas, when he demysti es the process of painting. His color patch formula guarantees the autonomy of the pigment.
Now who is interested in the color itself and its expression is Van Gogh. In his letter to Theo he writes “color expresses something by itself”. I cannot not mention the speculations on Van Gogh’s sickness by some, that his medicine ‘made him see such colors’ and say how preposterous they seem knowing his intentions and meanings from the content of his letters. In Van Gogh’s Expressionism - everything in the painting, not just a color, points to the expressive dramatic content of a place. Expression of a painting is its meaning. When we take a look at the ‘Night Cafe’, for example, distortion of reality, manipulation of perspective, violent stroke - all is to say about the place more truth than the literal truth.
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