Universal Grammar

In-Finitum in Venice

At the same time as the Venice Art Biennale, the exhibition In-Finitum is being held in clever dialogue with it. It is unfolded in the ancient palazzo of the artist, designer, set designer and eccentric collector Mariano Fortuny i Madrazo, the son of the famous artist of the second half of the 19th century Mariano Fortuny i Marsal. The In-Finitum exhibition is the most refined project of hundreds of Venetian summer exhibitions. This is the third part of a joint program of the Museums of the City of Venice (to which Palazzo Fortuny belongs) and the Axel Vervoordt Foundation - a Belgian designer, collector and philanthropist, friend of Rostropovich, Nureyev, Gergiev. The trilogy began during the last Venice Art Biennale withthe exhibition “Artempo”, curated by Jean-Hubert Martin . Then there was a part called "Academy". Finally, today in the palazzo you can meditate on the eternal themes of art, contemplating the In-Finitum exhibition. Translated - "Infinity".

The curatorial team of the exhibition, including Daniela Ferretti, Francesco Poli, Giandomenico Romanelli and Axel Vervoordt himself, continued the game begun by Martin in staging a cabinet of curiosities on a universal, cosmic scale. Alchemist's laboratory. Crazy antique dealer's shop. Everything is connected to everything.

The lower floor of the palazzo contains works in which the proto-substance of nature reigns supreme. Anselm Kiefer, Grazia Toderi, Lucio Fontana, Anish Kapoor each in their own way prepare a universal suspension of the four elements. Kiefer poured the silver milk of the heavenly bodies into the hot earth, scarred by history. Toderi flips the city lights captured on video into their moving mirror image. The magical pulsation of light is inspired by Italo Calvino’s book “Invisible (in Russian translation - “Imaginary”) Cities.” Fontana signals with “living signs” left on dense, mute materials and surfaces. Kapoor is fascinated by the spell of ghostly substances. The dense in his minimalist sculptures easily disincarnates into the ethereal, the deep is pushed out by the aggressive surface, the blinding eye instantly turns into black darkness. Everything is based on contrasts, on the sharp opposition of textures and materials.

The further you are drawn into the labyrinths, the more incomprehensible, shocking variations on the theme of “the magic of ambiguity” beloved by Martin and Vervoordt. The experiment is carried out on the territory of the system-forming categories of creativity: heaviness - lightness, temporary - spatial, redundancy - emptiness... It is not for nothing that the authors separated the prefix with a dash in the word In-Finitum. Francesco Poli explains that this emphasizes the problematic nature of interpretation, which involves the unification and separation of meanings. For example, “the infinite in the finite”, uncertainty, incompleteness.

The upper halls contain an intricate and somewhat frightening collection of Mariano Fortuny i Madrazo, including anatomical atlases, fragments of ancient sculptures, architectural perspectives, samples of exotic fabrics in which Fortuny the Younger was a master. Ancient paintings, vessels and sculptures come into play. Infinity here has become synonymous with non-finito, incompleteness, glorified by the Neoplatonists of the Renaissance, the romantics and their heirs, including Balzac and Gogol. The great abbozzi of Michelangelo drive crazy those trying to reveal the secret of perfection in incompleteness. A copy of "Pieta Rondanini" - a brilliant image of the spiritual disembodiment of inert matter - is paired with a video by Bill Viola, in which male and female figures gradually disappear in the light of lights walking across them. The silhouettes disappear into the darkness until the cycle begins again and we see the same figures standing in the water, illuminated by a pale glow. The images are inspired by the philosophy of Buddhism.

To travel through the grammar of Eternity, the universal grammar of the artistic worlds, the authors extracted from museum and private collections a great variety of opuses by the best artists of the 20th century. A mini-encyclopedia has been published, which includes, in addition to the named masters, Alexander Calder, Giorgio de Chirico, Jean Dubuffet, Alberto Giacometti, Donald Judd, Yves Klein, Joan Miro, Giorgio Morandi, Roman Opalka, and Pablo Picasso, and Gerhard Richter, and Anthony Tapies, and many others, including the composer John Cage, who in 1958 recorded a visual image of the vocal part being performed using colored lines (the sheet is kept in the Vervoordt collection).

It is logical that in such a laboratory for extracting a universal extract of perfection among the masters of the 20th century, priority is given to new esotericists - abstract expressionists (and their ideological followers) and those inspired by the spiritual practices of Buddhism. It is fitting that the catalog ends with a reproduction of Mark Rothko’s painting “Grey, Gray on Red” exhibited at In-Finitum. The reproduction is accompanied by statements from the master about the possibility of achieving in personal artistic emotion the sphere of universal knowledge, mythical reality. It is also natural that the catalog contains a conversation between Mr. Vervoordt and Tatsuro Miki, co-curator and artist of the exhibition, a considerable part of which is devoted to the life in art of Ma’s idea, born in Japan - fullness, meaningfulness of voids, pauses, caesuras. They are significant in creating an image no less (rather more) than imprinted material objects. Curators are looking for an approach (albeit intuitive) to Ma’s idea in the works of such diverse artists as Donald Judd or the 17th-century Spaniard Francisco Zurbaran.

A separate novella is the work of Japanese artists of the famous post-war avant-garde group “Gutai” (primarily Yoshihara and Saburo Murakami). These masters successfully brought together the idea of ​​abstract expressionism and minimalist art, inspired by the philosophy of Zen Buddhism.

The wonderful exhibition at the Palazzo Fortuny gives us hope that the theme of the search for a universal grammar of the plastic arts will provide interesting plot lines. Including at the upcoming Third Moscow Biennale.

Sergey KHACHATUROV, Venice - Moscow