Constantin Flondor
Constantin Flondor’s works created between 1966 and 1978 bear witness to the disciplined exercise to which the artist subjected himself in his visual research—to the way in which he structured his own questions while being influenced by writings of Paul Klee and Bauhaus figures as well as by the visual possibilities revealed in Pythagorean geometry’s specific type of spatiality and by a different kind of artistic production that integrated contemporary scientific culture (cybernetics, bionics, optics) and interdisciplinary theories (structuralism, computer aesthetics, semiotics, psychoanalysis, etc.).
The shifting of the art object into a multi-dimensional reality led to the mobilization of an intermediate realm in which plastic form is investigated in accordance with the perceptual field and certain principles of Gestalt theory. It is thus that looking spontaneously lends expression to potential images through the viewer’s movement, through the appearance and disappearance of elementary forms (line, circle, square, triangle), or through the generation of forms (as in his use of concentric circles against a background—or, in the case of grooved glass, through the use of tonal gradations including by means of primary structures). Flondor is remarkable for the freshness, curiosity, and joyfulness with which he reads the real. His artistic practice, which exhibits an evident mistrust in pure subjectivity, stands out for its internalization of structuralism—from which he does not diverge, assigning to himself an interpretative freedom of gesture, a programmatic experimentalism reminiscent of François Morellet’s 1962 manifesto “For an Experimental Programmed Painting.” Flondor’s works from the 1966–78 period, corresponding to his time with the 111 and Sigma groups, embody microcosms—micro-worlds that adhere both to a principle of order and to a systematic study of nature—of the world in which the artist breathes and thinks. The second thing that captures our attention is the artist’s communication with the natural order: study, systematic observation, the desire for integration, and the “state of perplexity” before the natural datum open up the way here to knowledge and assimilation. The unconditional dialogue with nature is projected as an inner vector of Flondor’s art, and he unceasingly maps out his own course, his own ideas and affects throughout his career. A.Se.
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