ABSTRACTION IN ART - BENOÎT HERMANS
text from the symposium Persistence of Painting


Painting finds itself between a rock and a hard place. Or in any case it finds itself heavily on the defence. Critics blame it for being at best academic, at worst reactionary. If it is about expressing the time we live in, other media are taken to be superior. The fact that it is so old and its record of service so long, seems to hinder it rather than benefit it.

Although I partly agree with this criticism, it doesn't lead in my case to the notion that painting as such would be an anachronistic medium. On the contrary. According to me, its weakness is to be found in the way in which painting has developed itself during the course of the past century. A silent agreement has been established between weak abstraction on one side and weak figuration on the other side. It is as if, being a painter, you are forced to choose between these two extremes and with it, doomed to arrive at a second-rate art. Flirting with another medium to overcome this dead-lock is a weak option. It is necessary to come revise painting with the means that it has developed itself in the past.

For a start, that means a reinterpretation of Modernism. With that I mean the following: The attack of early abstract art on figuration was exaggerated. The opposition abstract-figurative on which it was based isn't valid. It had in the beginning of the last century an important, polemical value.

But in retrospect, it turns itself against painting. Abstract art was exclusively resistant to certain decadent aspects of late 19th century painting: its desire for sentimentalism, its bourgeois prejudice and all those other aspects of spilled religion. In reality though, all good figurative art is always also abstract and therefore this attack was not as much a purification of art with the help of ushering in a totally new element, but more of a purification of the means of figuration itself. A good painting of the brothers Van Eyck, of Holbein or from the Italian Renaissance, always derives its strength from the fact that it is figurative and abstract at the same time.

Abstraction is here not only just a means to evoke a sense of space as in so called pure abstract art, but embodies a much more rich and complex whole in which portrait-painting and as much the rendering of materiality plays a part.

Take for example the series of Renaissance portraits Malewich made at the end of his life. According to a traditional view of abstraction it would be a fall-back to old, retrogressive forms. Yet they are beautiful works, holding the power and the promise for a totally new beginning, much more than do his programmatically justified suprematist works. In my conception of abstraction it's easily understood. His insight increased by working purely abstract for a length of time, making his figurative paintings stronger. Those portraits are not only much more abstract than his earliest figurative paintings, but therefore consequently better figuration.

The emptiness of that traditional notion of abstraction is also seen in the fact that it solely applies to an art-historical discourse. It completely overlooks the concrete experience of art and is nothing more than a global indication of a painterly style. It says nothing about the quality or the individual behaviour of one single painting. The terms impressionistic, baroque or post-modern are equally fuzzy approximations. What I take for abstraction instead, has all to do with the internal relations in one painting. Relations that are unique for every image.

A good painting deals with the experience of "higher simultaneousness" in my opinion. You walk down the street and in one glance you notice the strange gait of a passer-by, the clothes he wears and his facial expression. In the meantime a car passes, you have also noticed that the traffic-light jumped to green and before you know it, you have to slow down to prevent a crash with a cyclist. In everyday-life all these things take place in one single moment and are separated from each other by space. In a painting, however, they are combined within one framework.

Thereby two things are essential. Firstly, a continuous interaction with the rest of the world. Reality and painting, form, from a perspective of simultaneousness, two structures in themselves with a lot of space for creating new interconnections.

From my own images I demand that they endlessly generate new experiences in and outside the painting. And vice versa: if an unexpected occurrence happens in my day to day life, it asks for a reaction, a new image in my studio. A major resemblance between reality and painting is not only the phenomenon of simultaneous experiences, but includes the way in which those two are interrelated.

Secondly, I am striving for an optimum interaction with art-history. At the moment I am occupied with the works from the Italian Renaissance and Baroque and I notice that I am looking for a criterion in those works that is applicable to my own work as well. I find that there is a certain kind of knowledge contained in the works in regards to the way one can optimise the simultaneousness. How much order and chaos, how much sense and nonsense or aggression and compassion can one experience simultaneously?

A good example is the "The Entombment" of Caravaggio. According to me its structure is one of the most complex in art-history. In a most subtle way, many things come together. Psychological realism, a well-balanced clair-obscure and most of all a beautiful combination of human drama and a clear, monumental construction of the image.

The pivotal point around which the image revolves is the protruding left elbow of Nicodemus, the old man holding the body of Christ at the legs. This elbow forms the top of a piramide. The projected arm of Nicodemus works towards the background as a tight construction, keeping the whole, a strange mixture of figures with a diversity of expressions, in check. At once, but in other ways, the pyramid is important for the action taking place in the bottom part of the picture. On one hand it emphasises the force of the effort that Nicodemus makes. On the other hand it emphasises the reality of the carried body because it gives Christ's body extra plasticity.

I have to limit myself to this one structure in the painting. Of course there is much more and with each new discovery of a new coherence, a reconstruction starts anew and you see something different. All those constructions in themselves are not the most fascinating thing, as much as the fact that they blend into the representation and start competing with the human drama being depicted. The complex construction allows one only indirectly to take in the tragedy of the burial, and also gives one the possibility to undergo it on many different levels, consequently enhancing the intensity of the experience. All those strange overlappings and forms that gear into one another are ideal resonance's for the real subject of the painting.

In that sense this work is not unique. From the moment that in Italy Byzantine space is exchanged for a more naturalistic approach, this aspect starts to play a role in art. In the work of a whole series of painters from Giotto, Mantegna, Piero della Franscesca up till the High-Renaissance this problem is solved by every painter in his own way. Pathic space functions as a resonator for all the commotion and excitement that crops up in the rest of the image.

It makes Italian art from that time essential and an indispensable supplement to the abstraction in figuration that I am searching for in my work right now. Painting in optima forma, here abstraction and figuration are not standing opposed as two strangers, but invigorate each other and that makes this type of art at this moment, actually more relevant than most that is painted now.