“One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star” - Friedrich Nietzsche
Opened in late November, the current show at Patricia Low’s Venice branch presents an intriguing overview of recent works by the Hungarian artist Márta Kucsora. In direct proximity to the resplendent Ca’ Rezzonico, the gallery introduces Kucsora’s paintings in a fitting setting that displays the canvases in dialogue with the sublime urban architecture against which the artist’s constantly evolving formations of organic abstraction echoes the genesis and nature of the Lagoon city.
Few are thus the places better suited than Venice to celebrate Kucsora’s singular body of works. A city built on water, the so-called “Serenissima” has never ceased to inspire artists from near and far, an imaginary locus too improbable to conceive, too impossible to imagine. Suspended between sky and sea, while hovering across an infinite palette of chromatic hues, the Queen of the Adriatic has exerted her spell since time immemorial, giving rise to centuries of artistic production that stand unique in human history. Composition, movement and colour turned into the elements of a golden age of Renaissance painting, which now find a new artistic language in Kucsora’s oeuvre. Cascading networks of ever-morphing organic impressions, her works suggest allusions to cellular structures and cosmic views, likewise encapsulating the dimensions of life between micro and macro. In their elusive fluidity, the canvases insinuate motion, an eternal becoming, never pausing but always advancing —a metaphorical image of Venice herself. Everything appearing in Less Orderly Ways as the poignant title of Kucsora’s solo show at Patricia Low Gallery promises.
If the laws of nature are said to determine the origin of being, Márta Kucsora has found a way to harness their intrinsic force for painting as she orchestrates creations that are born from a painterly process wholly her own. Conceived in a fluid choreography between chance and control, hers are canvases that speak to an ambiguous, amorphous state of existence to which the artist lends a new visual language through her unique technique of brushless painting. Using diverse chemicals that either attract or repel each other, the finely calibrated layers of pigments unravel as animated topographies, complex tangles of colour and shape whose evocative visual evolution comes as both an invitation and challenge for the beholder to step into a pictorial space of visceral allure.
Pastes, lacquers and paints of varied density and viscosity perform a sublime dance upon their encounter on the linen canvas, thereby entering an impassioned struggle that ultimately results in compositions of rhythmic depth. By this, they reverberate with a creative thrust, an echo from within the intriguing chromatic designs that seem to explode in spontaneous collision. In a world determined by the pretence of linear historiography, Kucsora’s canvases unfurl as clinamina in a nod to Lucretius’ stipulation on the unpredictable swerves of atoms that occur at no fixed place or time. Similarly, her works come about in an innovative process indebted to a degree of serendipitous coincidence, in an unexpected updating of the Surrealists’ dictum of the “chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table”.1 On these grounds, Kucsora’s brushless paintings are evocative of Max Ernst’s vast experiments with the process of image-making across grattage, frottage or decalcomania that would eventually lead him “au-delà de la peinture” –“beyond painting”. In a similar way, rather than enforcing her artist’s self, Kucsora grants autonomy to the final outcome, acting as a mediator and medium for the image-to-be by navigating, guiding, directing the dance of pigments in an intricate conversation between brain and hand as the actual matter takes precedence in the realisation of the work.
As a delicate choreography, deliberately geared towards the execution of her works, Márta Kucsora’s gesture equally recalls the basic tenets of Abstract Expressionism with its greats such as Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler or Janet Sobel, whose radical approach to painting pushed the actual performance on canvas centre-stage. Of unprecedented corporeal, bodily investment in the process of creation, the movement promoted a new artistic language, severing ties with a past rooted in figurative traditions. As a consequence, these artists afforded a novel narration liberated from the idiom of graphic representation, breaking free from a mere “pictorial depicting” while at the same time challenging a long-overcome notion of ekphrasis as the meticulous translation of the visual to the verbal. The unspeakable semantics of the image, correspondingly, demonstrated the limitations of language for refusing a literal “reading” of the picture. In the same manner, Kucsora’s mesmerising compositions demand to be experienced rather than merely looked at, sensed rather than comprehended as a singular story. They exist in a multiplicity of the shifting image, an impossible duplicity of always becoming while yet already being. In their complex evolution, the tangles, networks and patterns arrest the gaze, while drawing the viewer into the vortices of colour. Theirs is an invitation to look in an ocular re-enactment of the choreography that witnessed their conception. Each work unfurls as a visual spectacle, a living process that performs itself time and again on the surface of the canvas.
Time then is the marker of their condition, serendipitous formations that build, contract, expand –assisted by the artist whose knowing hand determines the final image. Time arrested, transfixed. The instability of the ever-morphing re-composition of matter overcome. Correspondingly, the thinly executed layers of pigments constitute inter- and surfaces for an archaeology of the canvas. By this, the image unfurls byits carefully constructed and powerfully executed stratae, where the crevices and voids insinuate an in-betweenness and liminality towards new forms of being and becoming. Standing in front of Márta Kucsora’s works thus comes as an intimate encounter, confronting the beholder with their own presence, since offering a look into the micro and the macro, infinity on either end of the spectrum of life. Inevitably, they tear open the fissures of existence to expose the fundamental questions of Being in its barest, rawest form.
From Their Origin (2023), Disconnected From the Rest (2024) or Something Becoming Conscious (2024) are the evocative titles, gleaned from literature, in an extension of the notion of chance. In a motion that mirrors the genesis of her canvases –between chance and control –the artist allows for serendipity to decide upon opening the respective volumes at a random page to find inspiration for the subsequent assemblage of terms into evocative compositions. This extension of her creative practice forges an intricate bond between word and image, furthering the experimental as well as experiential reach of her canvases that stimulate the viewer in both visual and cognitive ways. Associations are set floating, a sensation of fluid thought arrested for the fraction of a moment in Márta Kucsora’s paintings where states of being coalesce, metamorphise, explode.
And here Venice appears again. This time as the liminal state of being, an eternal in-betweenness that translates into a temporal arrest on the surface of Kucsora’s works. The infinite flow of being and becoming, the liquidity and elusiveness of existence inadvertently brought to a halt on the canvas, one moment in time preserved against the infinite number of potential different outcomes.
- Sandrine Welte, art historian, independent curator based in Venice
1 The phrase was taken from Isidore-Lucien Ducasse, who working under the pseudonym of Compte de Lautréamont published his seminal work Les Chants de Maldoror in 1869.
all artworks © the gallery and the artist(s)
