FORM UND FLUIDITÄT – Galerie Stöckle Hauser, Stuttgart, 2017

Prof.Teixeira Coelho Nieto
Modern art started with form liquefying itself, like in Monet and, decades before him, with Turner, the true beginner of Impressionism whose steps Monet felt himself forced to follow by going to England and trying to find out what was that Turner saw when he looked through his window or when he stood by the sea. Both Monet and Turner were ahead of their time, their age was not the Age of Liquidity. But this is now. This is the age of the immaterial, of the virtual, of form fleecing away from itself.

The artists and artworks included in this exhibition belong to this sensibility, a sensibility that was initially described as abstractionism. But abstractionism, it is now possible to understand, is a rather precarious and inadequate word, albeit traditional and classic; to use it has become part of a routine in the arts. But routines should be avoided in the arts. These are forms in the process of liquefying themselves and escaping from themselves and from the beholder, which is something quite visible in Round 10, by Pedro Calapez, in Rómulo Celdrán’s Zoom 43 or in Anne Pantillon´s Lost Tribe , Robert Schad’s Matrak may seem to belong to a different family, at first glance: he apparently proposes hard forms, imposing forms in their steel presence. But look again: they are hard forms also in the process of escaping from their own definition, from the artist’s hands, from the observer’s eyes and understanding… What they tell us is that they are what is left from a process that points to something else, that came from something else… The picture is even clearer in Stefan Kleinhanns Circles. 

There are forces that prevent things to have a specific form, just like the sea that is forced to be formless by the winds. This age is pushing things to be formless or, rather, to have forms that are always liquid, fluid, always in the process of becoming. Seen together, these artworks give us the big picture of this present age, its sensibility, a picture that is in each one of them and in us, when we allow ourselves to know better. That’s the strength of art: to let us see what usually tries to escape us. That is comforting and enticing.