Vera Molnar: Beyond the Circle
Damien Sausset
Vera Molnar is credited with having played a pioneering role in the relationship between art and computers. While this recent fame is to be welcomed and seen as a deserved recognition for an artist who is 97 years old, the general perception of her practice is still based on a few shortcuts, which her retrospective (curated by Fabienne Grasser-Fulchéri) at the Espace de l’Art Concret in Mouans-Sartoux this summer, and then at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rennes this autumn (October
9th, 2021—January 9th, 2022), carefully avoids.
For Molnar, the result of her practice—the product or the work—emerges from a movement, or more precisely from a circular imperative: from the hand to the computer, from the computer to the hand: an endless movement, always renewed and yet always completed, in which mind, judgement and the laws of chance are fully involved. All Molnar’s art lies in the inexhaustible realisation of this demand, of these back and forths, these carefully thought-out variations, these sudden’ joyful shifts towards unexplored territories. “I’m both hand AND machine,” she is accustomed to say. “As one breathes in and out, I’m both, equally. Making the rational and the irrational coexist has been my life’s quest.” In a vaguely chronological sense the exhibition honours this requirement by addressing different periods of a practice that is far more complex than a simple subordination of art to the calculating power of the machine. For Vera Molnar was initially a draughtswoman who professed from the outset a definite love of the accuracy of analysis. Born into a wealthy family in Hungary, she took up drawing passionately from a young age, encouraged by a bohemian uncle. Her studies at the Budapest School of Fine Arts in the 1940s were a turning point. There she met her future husband, François Molnar, and the Western avant-garde through a few colour reproductions published in Skira books. Matisse was a shock, cubism and the various forms of abstraction models to be copied. An irrepressible need arose: to change her style in order to approach the shores of a constructive rigour that was the antithesis of the Socialist Realism imposed on her. The exhibition begins with a few rare inks and gouaches from 1946-47 representing Venus in profile. Although they are vaguely figurative and enhanced with sharp colours, their treatment is resolutely cubist. Also from the same period is a series of landscapes in pencil (1946), in which the trees and the sinuous lines of
the valleys are reduced to simple geometric figures. One is reminded of Klee, Mondrian, possibly Malevich, artists she would cite throughout her life in the series of tributes included in this exhibition.
RESOLUTELY GEOMETRIC
1947: with her future husband she finally settled in Paris, where she discovered Hélion and Herbin, and the, in 1956, François Morellet, her future lifelong friend, who was kind enough to introduce her to Max Bill. From that time on, she was resolutely committed to geometric abstraction. She stubbornly rejected the effects of composition. What counts is to distribute shapes on a surface in a “democratic” way, without privileging any place, without giving more importance to a part, a colour. The work becomes a perceptual trap. To obtain this result, only a “scientific” method can achieve it. A period of rigorous’ mathematical protocols began, allowing the distribution of simple figures, all based on what she called the “imaginary machine”, which can be summed up as computer programmmes without a computer. The series of works on paper entitled comme Malevitch [M for Malevich, 1960-61 and 1967], in which the letter M, strongly schematised, is distributed according to very
Mprecise directives fixing the coordinates of each figure (in x or y), even if it means introducing a variable - her famous 1% of disorder—into her “programme” in order to obtain radically different works (shifting one centimetre downwards, tilting, inverting, etc.), is an example of this. Faced with this draconian, implacable, meticulous system, carried out by hand or on the first plotters available, the artist nevertheless insisted on retaining a certain amount of freedom by allowing herself a few arbitrary choices, such as those of form (letters, squares, inclined lines), colours (from black to red, via blue), supports (paper, canvas) and textures (pencil, gouache, oil, silkscreen, plotter ink).
MACHINE TO HUMANISE
In 1968, through the mediation of her husband, then a researcher at the Computer Centre of the University of Paris Orsay, she finally gained access to an IBM computer. Although without a screen (this was in the prehistory of computing), the machine enabled her to broaden her research: “Instead of tracing a few versions by hand and stopping when you get tired,” she recalls, “with the computer and a plotter you can do dozens of versions in a row.The computer is more of a humanising machine.” Widely represented in
the exhibition, this period gives rise to a thousand variations, declensions and inventions. An example of a “scientific” method is the series of 160 squares pushed to the limit (1976). Initially made up of perfect squares traced in black ink by the machine, these squares are,in the course of the programme’s variations, distorted and scrambled into sets of overlapping figures. Their geometric character disappears. And in the margins, clearly visible, appear the marks of the plotter as so many signs participating not only in the composition, but reaffirming the mechanical process of realization.The series Hommage à Bardaut [Tribute to Bardaut, 1974] and Histoire d’I [Story of I, 1976] function on the same premise. An initial orderly geometric production is slowly contaminated and disrupted by a disorder that ultimately results in a set of disparate signs which, despite their apparent disorder, attest to a flawless discipline. The instruction, via the variables of calculation, composition and figures pushes exuberance to its ultimate limits. Take 100 Carrés Jaunes [100 Yellow Squares], an imposing acrylic canvas from 1977. The work seems to fulfil the statement of its title: orange squares on a yellow background, all distributed in a rigorous pattern. Then, confronted with a feeling of floating and confusion, the eye discovers how each figure is slightly off-centre in relation to the other. The grid oscillates, hesitates and imperceptibly wavers.The gaze contests the instability.
THE IMPORTANCE OF CHANCE
One registers the chasm that separates her works from Op Art. Here, randomness takes on its full importance, the randomness of the variation of the programme and therefore of the figures, the randomness of a shift towards another colour, another support, and finally the randomness of forms suddenly put at risk of themselves by the torsion or juxtaposition imposed by the programme. From room to room, one thing becomes obvious: the label of geometric abstraction does not characterise her practice, nor that of concrete art (even though she will never cease to feel particularly close to Gottfried Honegger). One does not find in her work a form of utopia, nor the belief in criteria of purity, exactitude, or implacable logic conveyed by a mathematizing art. This play with the hand, this famous circular requirement, is particularly evident in the numerous series (1977-2013) in homage to Monet and his haystacks. Though some tributes are entirely the result of computer programmes, others—gouaches, felt tips, inks—state the
weaknesses and beauty of a programme executed by a human being, with its perceptible errors in the wanderings of the line. Molnar neither wants to, nor can become, a slave to technology. The work by hand, but also the notion of the “plastic event” that she constantly put forward in the 1970s, responds to this concern.
A practice based on computer-generated programmes raises the formidable question of the validity of each of her “works” In such a coding system, all plastic proposals should be strictly equal and therefore tend towards infinity. However, though Vera Molnar claims the status of a researcher, she asserts herself as an artist. To do so, she must remain in control of the game. The “plastic event” is the aftermath, the moment of judgement in the face of the effects of surprise that she must experience. What is important? The radical deconstruction of her visual habits and tastes.The programme proposes, but it is up to the artist to correct it, to validate it, accepting a result here, sometimes making the computer leave certain gaps that she amuses herself by completing by hand, as if the better to affirm the possibility of an impossible dialogue between human and machine. This is illustrated by Lettre à Ma Mère [Letter to My Mother], a vast collection ini
tiated at the end of the 1980s based on correspondence with her mother. Her mother’s jumbled writing, copied and synthesised by Vera Molnar, is then subjected to computer analysis. The astonishing result is a network of oblique lines which, according to the artist, “inject order and reason into the impulsive and the disoriented” of an irrational writing style. Similarly, the motif of the Montagne Sainte-Victoire, particularly present in the last rooms, attests to this playful and not unhumorous merry-go-round between the hand and the computer. Considering this geological elevation as a natural outcome of the Gaussian curve (a mathematical curve known as the bell curve), Vera Molnar will never stop drawing it, painting it, then subjecting her experiments to the computer— for example the sequence Variations Sainte-Victoire (1996)—, before reinterpreting them in astonishing gouaches. TELLING IT DIFFERENTLY
The exhibition ends on an obvious point: this intellectual game with the computer, this famous circular requirement, continually blurs the lines. A mathematical schema from the 1960s or 1970s can reappear at any time, differently, in new ways, embodied in various media. And it is then a new work that we contemplate, as the last two rooms attest with a set of three very recent tapestries (2019-20) and an installation with fluorescent paint. If the three tapestries offer the wool support as a possibility to express old research in a different way, the fluorescent paint (a former Cnap [National Centre for Visual Arts] project in 2011) demonstrates how much Molnar’s practice is based on a conception of the image that is intended to be outside any figure and any language, as if freed from the certainty of the world, but densified by the idea that all machines and all possible calculations are openings only on the strict condition that human judgement, with its joys and follies, has the capacity to respond to them. And sometimes to take leave, to disappear.
The exhibition catalogue is published by Bernard Chauveau éditions (112 p., 19 euros).
Damien Sausset, independent curator and critic, has collaborated with Vera Molnar in the production of recent works.
À gauche left: 30 lignes brisées. 2020. Laine tissée woven wool. 180 x 180 cm. (Court. Bernard Chauveau / Galerie 8+4, Paris). À droite right: Nocturne. 2020. Acier steel. 20 x 20 x 20 cm. Vue de l’exposition exhibition view EAC, Mouans-Sartoux, 2021.
(Coll. part. © Ph. François Fernandez)