SHOWN IN APRIL AND MAY, 1971 AT THE III BIENAL INTERNACIONAL DEL DEPORTE EN LAS BELLAS ARTES AT THE REALES ATARAZANAS OF BARCELONA

KINETIC KINETIKÓS (movable, that moves)

KINETIC ART, although misunderstood and undervalued, remains a challenge to our capabilities, and I never cease to insist on going deeper and deeper into its true values, some of which I offer as follows:

• It frees us from pictorial tradition, thus reinforcing our imaginative faculty.
• It incorporates time into art. The time dimension is here perceived as visual rhythms or beats in our brain.
• It forces us to reflect on the exactitude and veracity of our sensory perceptions by offering a material reality - the artwork itself - whose limits cannot be precisely defined.
• It makes invisible the support over which the artwork is drawn, as our vision, finding it impossible to focus, absorbed in the attempt to capture the stimulating figure of our visual perception, overwhelmed by the effects which are perceived as movement (KINESIS).
• It surpasses the traditional language of image definition, making obsolete the established concepts of positive (black on white), or negative, transforming them into drawings in white or drawings in black, which act in a complementary way to generate together images which are no longer opposites that cancel each other out. Instead they interact as an extension of each other, tracing new lines that describe or make visible new figures or images. This is what I call drawing without drawing.
• It opens our mind to the abstract concept of the nature of the Universe, taking our awareness of its reality nearer to it than any other previous artistic expression.This perception helps us to understand the equilibrium as the product of eternal movement.

Imagining movement (KINESIS) in a static drawing must not be confused with the well-known and contemporary Op Art (Optical Art), which makes use of simple optical or decorative tricks using the sharp contrast produced by black and white, both of which have been exploited ad infinitum in fashion and marketing. Kinetic Art is not mere Op Art.

“TRANSCENDING ALL SCIENCE”

INTRODUCTORY TEXT IN SINE DIE BOOK

“A recent exhibition (at the beginning of 2007) at the Kunsthalle Schirn in Frankfurt, curated by Martina Wienhart, showed that kinetic art and Op Art are not a single, simple aesthetic that can be reduced to optical effects, but rather that they possess a Cosmovision or universal view of the world, a didactic and subversive intention, like the Happenings and Environments of the 60’s.

The dizzying mirrored space of Christian Megert at Kassel Documenta 4 in 1968, the installations of Rafael de Soto, Davide Boriani, Gianni Colombo, François Morelet, and others are the consequence of the combative lesson of Victor Vasarely and Bridget Riley and of an international aesthetic that runs through Europe from east to west and through America from north to south.

These artists, like the Russian Constructivists, before them or the members of the German Bauhaus, or the Dutch Neo-Plasticists of De Stijl, and after the Second World War, the Italian Rationalists and the architectural poet Gio Ponti, set out to break the boundaries between design and art, between science and technique, between industrial production and architecture, beyond cultural, political and social boundaries, without ever losing their clear awareness of the difference between that which is a functional work and that which is a painting or sculpture.”

© Kosme de Barañano - October 2008