Date: 2016
Author: Martim Brion
“I believe that a work of art, like metaphors in language, can ask the most serious, difficult questions in a way which really makes the reader answer for themselves, that the work of art far more than an essay or a tract involves the reader, challenges him directly and brings him into the argument.”
– George Steiner
To enter this argument/dialogue is what is intended. Not only stimulating but a great pleasure. It is not a scripted debate, it is for each participant to write his own. Each brings its interests, insecurities, ideas, and bounces them at the work. The work gives back its aesthetics, space, form, color, material, its relation with the rest of the exhibited works. It is an endless discussion which the more freedom it has from pre-conceived ideas and instructions on how to, the best and the more uplifting it will be. Off course, the greater the flights of fancy, the greatest the possible crash, but it is a risk freedom always entails.
“It is not appreciation of the artist that is necessary so much as appreciation of the art. It is difficult for an artist to live in an environment in which everything is judged by its utility, rather than by its intrinsic quality. The whole side of life of which art is the flower requires something, which may be called disinterestedness, a capacity for direct enjoyment without thought of tomorrow’s problems and difficulties.”
– Bertrand Russell
This quote can seem contradictory to the previous. Nonetheless, it is complementary; it is about the work and its enjoyment (note: not entertainment), and the viewer. It is not a great debate about poverty, or a political piece, it is the form, color, and material and its relations, there for the viewer to take in and take out. It is simple, apparently yes, but in order to arrive at an aesthetically pleasing simplicity one needs to delve into complexity, of the self and what surrounds it and that is not simple or easy.
What this project intends is exactly that, an aesthetically pleasing simplicity which bears the thoughts and interests of the artist aiming to continue the great argument which the arts have always presented us with. Any political, sociological, economical views are giving art an utilitarian focus which diminishes it to the same plain as a commodity and thus refocus the interest on its success in terms of market value, mere fluff.
Martim Brion 