CuratorWork

Alfredo Cramerotti


Writer, curator, publisher and contemporary artist.

Office address: MOSTYN Wales, 12 Vaughan Street, Llandudno LL30 1AB, UK - CuratorWork is an artsphere website

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OTHERMODERN: Kukje Gallery and Mazzoleni Art at Frieze Masters 2021

13 Oct 2021 - 17 Oct 2021
Organised by curator Alfredo Cramerotti, the joint presentation of Kukje Gallery (Seoul) and Mazzoleni (London / Turin) is based on a consideration for the ‘aesthetics of difference’ of both Dansaekhwa artists in Korea and the abstract/spatial artists in Europe. Focusing on the interlacements between non-figurative, monochromatic aspect of the Korean art movement, which avoided references to Western realism, and the process-based, Kinetic and Programmed Art positions that were flourishing at the same time in several European contexts, OTHERMODERN underlies the independence of these artists from an overall accepted idea of modernisation.

Details of Exhibition

The joint presentation of Kukje Gallery (Seoul) and Mazzoleni Art (London / Turin) inspires a horizon that does not seek to reproduce nature, abstract it, or even to express moods; but rather, to touch the nature of thought itself, upon which the Dansaekhwa artists in Korea and abstract / spatial artists in Europe impress themselves and meet together.

To address this, we are exploring two merging paths. One leads to rethinking the idea of rupture with the formalized culture as the reintegration into the soul of one's traditions, one's language and one's expressive materials. In this sense, rupture plays a fundamental role in effectively accounting for contemporary experience and feelings in all their elusive complexity and irreducible difference. The other path highlights how this common horizon promotes the idea that the work of art can be born not from the inspiration of the single individual but from collective processing. As the painting of the Dansaekhwa artists, adhering to the foundation of an evolution of the canvas based both on the simplicity of colour and on the transformation that occurs from introspective analysis, does not arise from an ideology or a discourse – so is the programmed and kinetic art, which are part of the wider response movement to the exaltation of the subjective expression of the Informal art proponents. And again, just as in Korean painting the material is not a mouldable means, because it has its own nature, which the artist's intervention brings out, underlines and reveres – so in programmed art there is a combinatorial logic, and equally in kinetic and spatial art an intrinsic dynamism, which presupposes an active perceiving subject to interact with.

However, it is not just about colour or lack of it on the one hand and colour, optical illusions and visual deceptions on the other. Although transitory, there is indeed a threshold – a recurring idea in the research of the Dansaekhwa artists – between doing and not acting. A threshold that, in the words of the art historian Giulio Carlo Argan – clearly referring to the visual research of programmed art – moves from the postulate that "The aesthetic fact does not exist in itself, as a value permanently connected with certain objects, the ‘art objects,’ but it begins to exist with the image that is formed in the subject who receives certain visual and psychological stimuli through perception." (Argan 1967, Grupa N, Museum Sztuki w Łodzi).

It is a question then of two operations that meet on the terrain of deconstruction, the one that subverts and annihilates hierarchies in favour of a new concept that does not reconcile, does not structure and does not hierarchize; not comparable, thus, to the system itself or to the idea of binary opposition. Therefore, from the joint presentation – on the idea of a research direction, not of a program – emerges the ‘aesthetic of difference’ with respect to the traditional relationship between the work and the subject, which dissolves every sublimation and every conceptualisation of the general and accepted idea of modernization.

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