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Olivia Seger is a Swiss-born, self-taught artist who has embarked on meticulous abstract research on a black background and calls her poetic Dark Art; her visual language is characterised by fluctuating splashes of colour that pour into the immensity of monochrome space. This gesture, detached from rigid structural rules, gives the works a flow worthy of Jackson Pollock's dripping. The signs, however, are not guided by a circular division, but by rapid movements. Seger thus recalls Pollock's emancipation, although she seems closer to the poetics of Sam Francis, his dense blots populating and colouring the canvases. If in Sam Francis - who is one of the great protagonists of American painting in the second half of the 20th century - colour is the very substance that stands out against a luminous background, Seger seems to be perfectly complementary to him, using the two basic colours of creation: White, the summa of all others, and Black, which serves as the background. Our investigation is also closely related to the work of Georges Mathieu, who is considered one of the greatest exponents of informal painting and lyrical abstraction. Mathieu proposes the use of gesture in the Paris School, in analogy to developments in American action painting. Seger takes Mathieu's formal freedom and develops it further in a contemporary context in which colour and gesture become means to get in touch with one's own experience and inner self.
Another commonality is with the works of Jirõ Yoshihara, the founder of the Gutai Art Group, an avant-garde movement born in Ashiya in 1954 that propagates an artistic expression closely linked to the Japanese "spirit" and informed by a Zen view of the world and things. In our work, spirit becomes matter and the latter becomes spirit; their work leaves traces in consciousness by turning to the search for the All, the Absolute, the Infinite. Dark Art White plays with the dialectic of opposites by performing uninterrupted metamorphoses between earth, air, fire, water and every other sensual element. The small drop of colour thus becomes microcosm and macrocosm, a planet near and far, outlining with its spray an immeasurable galaxy or universe in which one can lose oneself.
Book content:
This
publishing initiative embraces the study of contemporary artists who present
affinities, quotations, links and similarities with masters of the past, beyond
time and space. Art, over the centuries, has been a source of inspirations and
references, in the same way the project, articulated in several exhibitions of
which the publication represents a visual cross-section, will suggest those works
that, despite a current language, are harbingers of universally valid values of
beauty. Authoritative masters of the past - in painting, sculpture and
photography - will find new 'heirs' in some of today's artists according to a
perspective that sees the art system as a large family of different modes of
expression, imparting each other, to borrow the words of Ludwig Wittgenstein.
This decisive step of rapprochement between past and present is a structural
characteristic of art in which we can recognise what Francesco Arcangeli called
'tramandi', i.e. long threads that connect, for example, the works of Mondrian
to Piero della Francesca, those of Wiligelmo to Pollock or the works of Cimabue
to Morandi. Here then, the idea of the 'classic' is no longer understood as an
immutable value to be anchored to in order to counter the fluidity of the
present, but rather as a starting point, a point of reflection and a foundation
for the creation of new aesthetic forms and contents.
Publisher:
Giunti Editore
Italian /256 pages / 2023
ISBN-10 : 8809958268
ISBN-13 : 978-8809958265
Available in bookstores
