VIE DES FORMES / THE LIFE OF FORMS
The Vie des formes/The Life of Forms evolved over several years – the first installation of the work (comprising 42 elements) spanned the period from 1998 until 2005. In that composition, the work was first presented at the exhibition Love is a Battlefield (together with Žiga Kariž) at the Škuc Gallery in 2005. The exhibition subsequently traveled, first to Likovni salon Celje and the Mestna galerija Nova Gorica, where the initial installation from the Škuc Gallery changed with on-site solutions and adaptations to the spatial circumstances in the galleries; and then, in an upgraded and expanded variant (comprising 52 elements), to the Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University, Kansas, USA, in 2006.
The latest, most comprehensive and complex presentation of the work took place at the Loža Gallery in Koper in 2011: the Vie des formes/The Life of Forms 1998–2011 included 118 works of the most diverse forms from the period.
These are “material works” of art, material works “here and now,” original forms, one-off 3D forms, sculptures or reliefs produced primarily directly by hand or utilizing only basic tools and realized in a vast array of materials (both natural and man-made, both traditional and contemporary). There are three groups of works:
a. Dialogues of Form
b. Changes of Form
c. Arrangement of Material Forms
The installation comprises three positions: a. wall, b. floor, c. ceiling.
This is an innovative and complex sculptural installation. The wall composition consists of various independent and rounded-off sculptural forms, reliefs and relatively small objects enclosed in uniform wooden cases and brought together in diverse, visually dynamic interrelations and juxtapositions: left–right, above–below, a part–the whole. The sculptural wall composition View des forms… is a combination of a variety of independent works united into a larger whole. Already the artist group V.S.S.D. (Painter Do You Know Your Duty), while active between 1985 and 1995, formulated and used a great variety of approaches and visual means and an exceptionally wide range of different techniques and innovative media, e.g. welded iron, a special direct technique of casting aluminum, clay, fired clay, plaster of Paris, sand, pencil/graphite, painting techniques on various surfaces (panels, canvas, glass, insulation boards) and based on various combinations (“recipes” for) of acrylic, glue and pigments, metallic paints, airbrush, painting directly by hand on cotton (cotton wool), “brushless” paintings on paper, silkscreen, photographs… For the View des Formes/The Life of Forms, I expanded and “enriched” this creative tradition, visually very rich in form and material, with new methods and materials: modern synthetic epoxy resins, natural rubber, Kremenit ceramic powder, artificial stone, bronze, string, wire… and a range of natural materials such as beeswax, snail shells, bread, potatoes, impregnated fruit.
The wall composition is in dialogue with works-forms on large bases and with larger works-forms, sculptures, objects on the floor. Materials are plastic, PVC, asphalt, bitumen, aerated concrete, expanded polystyrene, polyurethane. These forms are arranged in groups and relations, but not enclosed in cases.
All the forms are consciously and deliberately shaped, formed primarily by hand. In shaping them I have focused above all on the hand, on handicraft, shaping and molding everything by hand, with my hands, avoiding all tools or machine techniques bar the most basic ones, such as sculpting tools, awls, sanders, saws, industrial heat guns – because I find the hand to be more radical and subversive today than using contemporary machinery and computer technologies.
Content
Early in the 20th century, Henri Focillon catalogued many unusual characteristics of forms in his exceptional and, for our times, highly unusual (and perhaps also odd, dangerous) book, a sort of “dictionary of forms” entitled View des Formes, or The Life of Forms. What I am particularly interested in here is perpetual motion and the metamorphosis of form/s.
What I am particularly interested in here is the perpetual motion and the principle of the metamorphosis of form/s. The form is a very complex phenomenon; with the aid of Focillon we speak about a dynamic, moving and thus always non-static, non-frozen form. Every form also has a past, memory, a past form inscribed in every new, current form. Thus, a form “in itself” is not only, for instance, a curved line, a color or substance, but is a specific dynamic organization including both its interior and its exterior, together with their inter-reactions – what we today would call relations. Here Focillon refutes the traditional oppositional relation between form and matter, since matter is not only passive, but is active in forming a work, and the formed work is a constant exchange between matter and “its” form. There are two pitfalls in the idea that a form has its “activity graph”: firstly, that we may “strip it down to the barest fundamentals”, and secondly, that “a form is reduced to a contour or diagram”. In his work, Focillon insists on the fullness and complexity of the form as a “construction of space and matter”, which is manifested as an “equilibrium of mass”. Focillon sees this life of a form as a “living organism”, in which the image, the picture, the content originate, change, and also disappear. Forms are thus not fixed, they are non-static and they change (disappear/originate), since their time or relations are not clearly defined, frozen or arrested. Forms permanently originate, change, paintings are permanently “unfinished”, open, and thus permanently alive.
