Vera Molnar expõe “Perspectives and Variations” no Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain de Lorraine (FRAC de Lorraine) em Metz (França), até 26 de Abril. As obras da artista nas suas próprias palavras são “ready-mades” mentais- culturais. Sobre a mostra publicam-se o press release da instituição e os textos de Hélène Guenin e Magali Parmentier .

Born in 1924 in Hungary, Vera Molnar settled in Paris in the 1950s after having completed her studies at the School of Fine Arts in Budapest. Close to minimalist esthetic through her use of two- color process and to geometrical forms, her work, eminently conceptual due to the interplay of method and questioning, escapes fashions and historical categories. In order to do away with what she calls “mental-cultural ready-mades,” Vera Molnar employs different programmatic games and mathematical principles in order to produce series of work guided by a unifying quest for the invisible. However, like the members of the Oulipo, she never shrinks from playing with and foiling self-imposed constraints.

At Frac Lorraine, she presents two in situ creations, enlargements of smaller historical works. She thus produces wall paintings for the gigantic walls in the exhibit halls. Two principles are at play here: the delegation of production to others and the change of scale. By questioning these fundamental elements of creation (the artist’s hand, the size of the work), she reminds us that the idea of the artwork takes precedence over its production which is conditioned by contingent criteria.

Promenade (presque) aléatoire (1998-1999; Frac Lorraine collections), an installation previously unseen in Lorraine, completes this necessarily subjective selection with respect to sixty years of creation.

Vera Molnar and the overcoming of painting

As we look at Vera Molnar's works, one thing is certain: the artist shrinks from any complacency and considers her medium as an experiential ground to be ceaselessly renewed. Her reliance upon series, variations of forms, colors and rhythms based on a given assignment contributes to this endless exploration.

Vera Molnar's approach perfectly coincides with the artistic vocation of Frac Lorraine which strives to offer artists a place they can appropriate, and to show the public artworks which are open to reflection and to encounter.

For her exhibition at 49 Nord 6 Est, the artist has decided to rethink some of her earlier works in reference to the scale of the exhibition space. The works she proposes are based on the play of constraints freely agreed on by both parties: on the change of dimensions and the delegation of production.

The artist draws inspiration from telephonic paintings of her compatriot Laszlo Moholy-Nagy who, in 1922, ordered 5 paintings over the telephone from a sign painter. This way, Moholy-Nagy demonstrated that the idea of an art object does not need to be a direct result of the artist's hand or skill. He anticipated by several decades the principles of conceptual art.

Created at different periods, Molnar's works presented at FRAC Lorraine show at a glance a great diversity of her work and the obsessional character of the use of motifs: the square, the trapezoid, the line. The series of drawings entitled 144 Trapezoids (1975)-which reveals the mechanism of passage from one geometric figure to another-may play the role of a discrete point around which pivot all the exhibited works. The wall paintings displayed at FRAC Lorraine are the first ever conceived on that scale by that artist. They prove that contemporary creation is not a question of age, but of the artist's approach.

Vera Molnar A singular approach

Vera Molnar represents one of the most radical tendencies of “minimalism French-style”(1) the foundations of which she had helped establish. Her first works, elaborated on the basis of an elementary formal vocabulary (lines, strokes...) and a two-color process (black and white), rapidly evolved under the influence of Vantongerloo. The writings of this neo-plastician, who sought to define the pictorial surface and the composition of the painting by means of mathematical formulas, reverberated with Vera Molnar's own preoccupations and oriented her work towards rigorous and systematic artistic research related to the scientific method and to the field of scientific experimentation.

Co-founder (notably with François Morellet) of the Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel(2) which advocated rationalization of painting and proposed to establish the basis for a science of art, Vera Molnar obscures the spiritual and symbolic dimension inherent in Vantogerloo's work in order to focus solely on the relationship between mathematics and art. The work of art is no longer merely a visual experience: “In my work, there is no such thing as a symbolic, metaphysical, or mystical component; there is no message, no message whatsoever, nor a raccoon”(3). This approach, founded on visual experience, finds its extension in the research of her husband, François Molnar, expert in the psychophysiology of sight.

Starting in 1968, Vera Molnar integrates new technologies into her work. The computer becomes a tool in the service of her experiments and the basis of a new method of creation. Her works, digitally realized, are the result of programming and, consequently, of a series of operations.

Images are thus produced according to a system, a predetermined and rigorous method, which foreground the process of realization. Yet the artist does not delegate the creative process entirely: “the computer is just one tool which makes it possible to free painting from the weight of fossilized classical heritage. Its immense combinatory capability facilitates a systematic investigation of the infinite field of possibilities.”(4)

Hélène Guenin

1 - Expression introduced by Serge Lemoine.

2 - The Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel (GRAV) was founded in July 1960 by Vera

Molnar, François Morellet, Horacio Garcia Rossi, Julio Le Parc, Francisco Sobrino,

Joël Stein, and Jean-Pierre Yvaral.

3 - Vera Molnar: Inventaire 1946-1999. Ladenburg: Prevsing-Verlag, 1999. p. 47

4 - Jean-Michel Place. “Vera Molnar, Regard sur mes images.” in: Revue d'esthétique

(Paris) no. 7, 1984.

Promenade (presque) aléatoire [(Nearly) random walk] is one of the artist's latest experiments. The work is a product of an algorithm created by Vera Molnar and programmed by the mathematician and artist Erwin Steller. The forms generated by that mathematical figure are potentially infinite. A certain number of these forms were printed, then reproduced on the wall of the exhibition space using small nails and a black cotton string. The paper medium has thus been abandoned and replaced with an installation.

The work has, at first glance and thanks to the medium used, a special place in Vera Molnar's work which is based on drawing, printing, and painting. It nicely demonstrates the artist's capacity for experimentation with new materials, for opening new horizons and for ceaseless searching. Above all it demonstrates incredible energy and an astonishing propensity for renewal and for developing new hypotheses.

This particular piece with strings has a precedent in one of the versions of Homage to Dürer. In this series, Vera Molnar explores the geometric variations of a path traced by a line which connects the numbers from the magic square found in Dürer's Melencolia (1514). At the Stiftung für konkreten Kunst in Reutlingen, Germany, in 1990, Molnar presented some of the figures obtained in the form of a wall border where the black strokes were replaced by cotton string and where little nails marked the location of numbers, now vanished referents.

In the Promenade (presque) aléatoire [(Nearly) random walk], lines, repeated in a continuous wall border without beginning or end, play on the perception of space and the surface of the wall. Abstract, rigorous mathematical formulas are embodied in the fragile and tangible materiality of a line which “winds by leaping, sliding, groping, hopping, pushing forward, fleeing [...], starting over and relentlessly continuing on and on”(1).

The trapezoid is one of the few recurrent forms to which Vera Molnar returns again and again. Declination of the square, the trapezoid is stretched first this way, then that way, and, like Ariadne's thread, weaves together various productions of the artist. In 1987-88, Vera Molnar made a collage, 25 x 256 cm each, which she entitled Trapèzes penchés à droite (Trapezoids leaning to the right). Some twenty years later, she returns to the composition and adapts the dimension to three walls of a large hall at Frac Lorraine. In reality, what one sees first is a horizontal line forming a sort of graph: an electrocardiogram which abandoned its rigidity to fluctuate like a wave. What is it composed of? A multitude of trapezoids which barely touch, placed along the vertical axis. As in the game of dominos, each element follows another which, in turn, implies the next. Some might see in these oblique forms an homage to Paul Cezanne's slanted brush stroke, while others might remember the effect generated by this viewer-encompassing landscape, heir to Soto and Monet. However, as much as forms and the notion of the surroundings, we must also emphasize the role of color in a composition of this type. Fascinated by lady bugs, poppy flowers, and sunsets “terribly, sublimely red, as if bathed in blood,” Vera Molnar explains humorously that when she was a child she was called a “redhead,” and contemplating the freckles on her knees undoubtedly constituted her first lesson in non-figurative art. Later on, she stopped identifying with Little Red Riding Hood, then left the Communist Party because, as she said maliciously, “the red in Mao's little red book was not to my taste.” In painting, she learned to love the Etruscan red as much as that of Pompei, of Russian icons, of Carpaccio and Titian, or that of Tiepolo, Van Dyck, Matisse and Bonnard. She also says that she rejoiced when a friend told her that in Russian the words “beautiful” and “red” are very similar.

She recalls, in extremely poetical and sensual terms, her collection of pieces of paper in different shades of red: “from time to time, in order to throw myself a little party, I spread them out, like a picnic, on the ground, just to look at them”(2). The rigor of abstract and geometric art, presenting an infinite number of possibilities and variations, is thus coupled with the intensity of red which can be defined in terms of esthetic pleasure. However, as the artist said: “A color does not need to be described, a form does not need to be explained, an artistic constellation does not need to be narrated. (...) All literary discourse applied to a work of art can only diverge, water down, and alienate the work's essentially visual effect”(3).

Magali Parmentier

All citation from: Vera Molnar. Inventaire 1946-2003.

Ladensburg: Preysing-Verlag, 2004

1 - “Solo d'un trait noir,” Vera Molnar, November 6, 1997.

2- Vera Molnar, “Voyage au bout du rouge,” p. 52-53.

3- Vera Molnar, quoted in David-Olivier Lartiguad, “Les écrits de Vera Molnar”, p. 21 .

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