Pieces, Patterns, Lines

Collage is the art of superimposition, of the meaningful unit forcibly placed between somewhat unorthodox and sometimes antagonistic perceptible items, an art “of discontinuity, montage and fragments, of cut and paste”. We must not forget – and it is an essential condition of survival for any public art space – that the contemporary sensibility declares itself in a variety of frequently conflicting ways. And so, of course, they go back to collage, as art and as artistic attitude, as a hazardous horizon of imagination that we might describe as soluble – the preferred term nowadays is liquid – prepared for action in any ideal sphere of perceptual signification. Which would call into question once again the incisive observation made by Ortega y Gasset in 1925, showing caution at a time of backlash against the avant-garde: “The art of the past is not art, it was art.” The artists and works selected for this occasion reveal the extent of the risk that the IVAM took in the early days of its collection. The artists are decisive: Schwitters, Moholy-Nagy, László Péri, Hamilton, Rauschenberg, Oldenburg … to name only those that are of unquestionable international stature. Moreover, as a methodological guide to aid the visitor, the works are arranged in sections of simply descriptive categories that indicate a possible itinerary and help us to appreciate these works and objects of art, always unusual and autonomous, and their formal contribution to a dazzling figurative riddle still capable of surprising the most exacting visitor: I. Matter. Form II. Image. Figure III. Sign and Gesture IV. Memory, Tradition and Experimentation V. Narrative and Action