Saturday, March 18, 2017

Joon




Joon, HOP gallery, Tallinn, Estonia 5th-23rd February 2016


“Simplicity is not an end in art, but one arrives at simplicity in spite of oneself, in approaching the real essence of things, simplicity is at bottom complexity and one must be nourished on its essence to understand its significance.” — Constantin Brâncuși



While Carla and Slavomíra were preparing their exhibition, they were each reading a book which they then recommended to me: The Thinking Hand by Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa. It’s a fascinating read for anyone interested in the work of hands in connection with art and craft, and it is in this text that I found the above quote by Brancusi. Simplicity (and that explanation of it, in particular) is the idea that keeps returning to me as I think about the JOON exhibition.
Many of the works evoked a sort of “primitive modernism” that belies the refined and time consuming labor that went into them. By contrast, some works were made quickly, but were the result of hours of thought and sketching. Brâncuși mentioned “the essence of things”, and Slavomíra and Carla’s exhibition explored the essence of space and drawing (and their boundaries, lines, and dimensions).


To steal another quote found in Pallasmaa’s book, this one by Renzo Piano: “You start by sketching, then you do a drawing, then you make a model, and then you go to reality – you go to the site – and then you go back to the drawing. You build up a kind of circularity between drawing and making and back again.” This brings me to the setup of the gallery space. The gallery was a white rectangle, and in the center of the room stood a white table illuminated brightly from above, with small objects placed on its surface and padding on the floor underneath. By viewing the 3-dimensional objects from above and then looking at their 2-dimensional shadows from below, visitors were able to quickly grasp the connection between idea–drawing–object. Complexity made simple, again.



There is another element of the work of Carla and Slavomíra (both individually and in the context of this exhibition) that I think is found far too infrequently in art — and that element is playfulness. During the exhibition, they invited visitors (old and young) to freely play with the objects and make new arrangements which allowed visitors to share in that delight, but more seriously it allowed them to directly explore the “circularity between drawing and making.” It is clear that both artists find joy in the process of creation (or “experimentation and the art of play”, as Pallasmaa calls it). The music for the exhibition, sculpted by sound artist José Pedro Carvalho, would have been a bit eerie if not balanced by this playfulness. Instead, it created a relaxing and zen-like ambiance in the gallery. It may be subtle, but that sense of calm and play has been preserved in this catalog.

Rachel Kinbar












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