The solidity of the flow
 |
| Georges Vantongerloo by Ernst Scheidegger. Photo by Ernst Scheidegger. © Ernst Scheidegger |
George Harrison once sang “we were talking about the space between us all [...] life flows on within you and without you”. It was 1967 and the song was titled Within you without you and featured in the Sgt. Pepper’s lonely hearts club band album released by The Beatles. To be conscious of the inherent fluidity of all solids as existence itself is a perfect way to discover the work of the Belgian artist Georges Vantongerloo.
Georges Vantongerloo was born in Antwerp, Belgium, in 1886. He studied at the Fine Arts Academies in Antwerp and Brussels. When the First World War started, he was conscripted as a soldier but wounded in a gas attack he became discharged from the army and he escaped to the Netherlands where in 1916 he met the Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg whose at that time ideal in painting was the complete abstraction of reality. The Netherlands were neutral during the war so it was hardly difficult to leave the country after 1914 and the Dutch artists became isolated from the main centre of the artistic activity of the time, Paris. The same goes for the foreign artists that were in the Netherlands during the war and were unable to return to their own countries. Theo van Doesburg started looking for other artists to set up a journal and start an art movement and along with Georges Vantongerloo and others like the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian or the Hungarian Vilmos Huszár, they signed in 1917 the manifesto of De Stijl also known as the neoplasticism movement. They advocated pure abstraction and universality by a reduction to the essentials of form and colour. To simplify visual compositions to the vertical and horizontal directions was one of their purposes and along with the use of primary colors with a main role of black and white, it became the basic tool.
Georges Vantongerloo developed his work in painting and sculpting following the abstract concepts and playing with volumes and lines including mathematic studies in order to create harmonies with colours and forms. His work as an architect is perfectly integrated in his paintings and sculptures. Science and technology were deeply present not only in the final form of his art but also in all reflections behind it. This can be easily deducted from his 1930 work Composition émanante de l'équation y=-ax 2 +bx+18 avec accord de l'orangé-vert-violet . By the years, the work of Vantongerloo was getting closer to movement and waves and started to create opener spaces giving to the observer a freedom feeling.
Finally, Georges Vantongerloo worked with the limits because he was looking for the infinite, noticing that fluid and solid are not different circumstances. He died in Paris on 5th October 1965.
Georges Vantongerloo | Un anhelo de infinito. A selection here
Retrospective at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
Text by Juan Carlos Romero
Photo by Ernst Scheidegger
Courtesy of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid
All rights reserved