[…] une abstraction qui n’en retient que l’essence
Yves Bonnefoy
In an essay from 1953 named Les tombeaux de Ravenne, Yves Bonnefoy uses these words to define what ornament is. The recently departed French poet and essayist initially claims that an ornament works pretty much like a concept, as opposed to an object. We may paraphrase his words by saying that, like a concept usually does, ornament has the particular power of showing the essence of an object by means of abstraction.
This understanding of ornament seems to fit what Agostino Iacurci is doing in this unedited corpus of works, which for many aspects represents a breaking point in his production so far: an exploration of local (Mexican) ornaments through painting and sculpture. But let us step back a moment to our starting concern: ornament as a sort of abstract, “ontological tool”, a way to reveal the essence of a specific object. Is this not, indeed, the very endeavor of art tout-court? The act of representing or conceptualizing an object – in a rather generic sense: a physical object, a spiritual one, an idea, a phenomenon, an emotion… – through the artwork is always an exercise of abstraction.
Ornaments are, of course, works of art. Yet the Western world has for a long time highlighted a significant distinction between the fine and the decorative – being rather ungenerous with the latter – a distinction that mostly lies in one specific vocation of all ornaments: their adjunctiveness, that is being other than the artwork but at the same time bond to it. Being adjunctive also means having some kind of function: unlike an artwork, an ornament is never for its own sake or for a “deep”, “noble” cause, but it is meant to embellish something else (like a capital does to a column), or to add value to it (like a frame does to a painting).
Jacques Derrida borrows from Immanuel Kant the Greek word parergon as a synonym for ornament, but also and particularly to describe the existing ratio between it and the ergon, namely the artwork. There is something disturbing about the parergon: it is accessory to the ergon, but at the same time we cannot be sure that the parergon is completely external to the ergon; it is marginal while playing at the same time a fundamental role in the ergon’s “functioning”. Ornaments provide artworks their place and unity: as Derrida puts it, “they are inseparable from a lack within the ergon. And this lack makes for the very unity of the ergon” (La vérité en peinture, 1978).
Then, it looks like the ornament could only be experienced, or understood, through its relationship to the artwork: then let us imagine a work of art in which the Derridean ratio work-ornament is somewhat subverted. I don’t mean an artwork in which an ornament is simply reproduced or integrated in the pictorial fiction – like in the famous gallery paintings by David Teniers the Younger, Fortunato Depero’s tapestries or René Magritte’s Le masque vide, among many other examples. I rather mean an artwork whose very subject is the ornament itself, like if a frame stepped inside a canvas and pushed away anything else to make room for itself alone: a painting about a frame, an ergon about the parergon.
Such a subversion is the object of Agostino Iacurci’s pictorial research. A trompe l’oeil in a figurative sense: not supposed to cheat the eye of the observer – the quasi-abstract appearance of such plain-colored and playful canvases could never succeed in this – but to cheat our understanding of the common boundaries between art and decoration.
Mexican architectural ornaments and ornamental plants can be a challenging subject for a painting and sculpture exhibition. It looks like the artist, during his urban exploration of Mexico City, has focused on what is commonly perceived as marginal, and made artwork out of it. Door and windows frames, friezes and balcony bars have thus become the object of symmetric, colorful paintings, in which the pictorial frames coincide with the edges of the canvas, the central part of which is deprived of any other pictorial element. On the other hand, agaves, ferns and cacti have become wooden sculptures – in which trunks look like elongated versions of the ornamental bars that the artist has eye-captured from some balcony during his walks – that remind us of some wooden representations of flowers made by Futurist artist Giacomo Balla between 1918 and 1925.
Giacomo Balla, Flora futurista
The architectural ornaments that inspired Agostino Iacurci’s work are very different from those that Yves Bonnefoy bore in his mind while writing the words that have introduced this text, namely the decorations he had seen in Ravenna, inside the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia. In that specific case – as Georges Didi-Hubermann points out in his reading of Bonnefoy’s essay – the object conceptualized by those mosaics, marbles, alabaster windows and sarcophagi concerns the transition from life to death, and the possibility of capturing and condensing that very transition in a unique place. An exhibition is not a mausoleum, and an exhibition is never ornamental. Yet as we see here, an exhibition can be about ornaments, and their power to unveil an essential something of a particular place.
[…] une abstraction qui n’en retient que l’essence
Yves Bonnefoy
In an essay from 1953 named Les tombeaux de Ravenne, Yves Bonnefoy uses these words to define what ornament is. The recently departed French poet and essayist initially claims that an ornament works pretty much like a concept, as opposed to an object. We may paraphrase his words by saying that, like a concept usually does, ornament has the particular power of showing the essence of an object by means of abstraction.
This understanding of ornament seems to fit what Agostino Iacurci is doing in this unedited corpus of works, which for many aspects represents a breaking point in his production so far: an exploration of local (Mexican) ornaments through painting and sculpture. But let us step back a moment to our starting concern: ornament as a sort of abstract, “ontological tool”, a way to reveal the essence of a specific object. Is this not, indeed, the very endeavor of art tout-court? The act of representing or conceptualizing an object – in a rather generic sense: a physical object, a spiritual one, an idea, a phenomenon, an emotion… – through the artwork is always an exercise of abstraction.
Ornaments are, of course, works of art. Yet the Western world has for a long time highlighted a significant distinction between the fine and the decorative – being rather ungenerous with the latter – a distinction that mostly lies in one specific vocation of all ornaments: their adjunctiveness, that is being other than the artwork but at the same time bond to it. Being adjunctive also means having some kind of function: unlike an artwork, an ornament is never for its own sake or for a “deep”, “noble” cause, but it is meant to embellish something else (like a capital does to a column), or to add value to it (like a frame does to a painting).
Jacques Derrida borrows from Immanuel Kant the Greek word parergon as a synonym for ornament, but also and particularly to describe the existing ratio between it and the ergon, namely the artwork. There is something disturbing about the parergon: it is accessory to the ergon, but at the same time we cannot be sure that the parergon is completely external to the ergon; it is marginal while playing at the same time a fundamental role in the ergon’s “functioning”. Ornaments provide artworks their place and unity: as Derrida puts it, “they are inseparable from a lack within the ergon. And this lack makes for the very unity of the ergon” (La vérité en peinture, 1978).
Then, it looks like the ornament could only be experienced, or understood, through its relationship to the artwork: then let us imagine a work of art in which the Derridean ratio work-ornament is somewhat subverted. I don’t mean an artwork in which an ornament is simply reproduced or integrated in the pictorial fiction – like in the famous gallery paintings by David Teniers the Younger, Fortunato Depero’s tapestries or René Magritte’s Le masque vide, among many other examples. I rather mean an artwork whose very subject is the ornament itself, like if a frame stepped inside a canvas and pushed away anything else to make room for itself alone: a painting about a frame, an ergon about the parergon.
Such a subversion is the object of Agostino Iacurci’s pictorial research. A trompe l’oeil in a figurative sense: not supposed to cheat the eye of the observer – the quasi-abstract appearance of such plain-colored and playful canvases could never succeed in this – but to cheat our understanding of the common boundaries between art and decoration.
Mexican architectural ornaments and ornamental plants can be a challenging subject for a painting and sculpture exhibition. It looks like the artist, during his urban exploration of Mexico City, has focused on what is commonly perceived as marginal, and made artwork out of it. Door and windows frames, friezes and balcony bars have thus become the object of symmetric, colorful paintings, in which the pictorial frames coincide with the edges of the canvas, the central part of which is deprived of any other pictorial element. On the other hand, agaves, ferns and cacti have become wooden sculptures – in which trunks look like elongated versions of the ornamental bars that the artist has eye-captured from some balcony during his walks – that remind us of some wooden representations of flowers made by Futurist artist Giacomo Balla between 1918 and 1925.
Giacomo Balla, Flora futurista
The architectural ornaments that inspired Agostino Iacurci’s work are very different from those that Yves Bonnefoy bore in his mind while writing the words that have introduced this text, namely the decorations he had seen in Ravenna, inside the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia. In that specific case – as Georges Didi-Hubermann points out in his reading of Bonnefoy’s essay – the object conceptualized by those mosaics, marbles, alabaster windows and sarcophagi concerns the transition from life to death, and the possibility of capturing and condensing that very transition in a unique place. An exhibition is not a mausoleum, and an exhibition is never ornamental. Yet as we see here, an exhibition can be about ornaments, and their power to unveil an essential something of a particular place.
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