IN THE SPACE OF MEMORY AND RECOLLECTION

(A PREFACE)  

There is no authentic lyricism without
a grain of interior madness.

To re-read oneself, to recall, to remember, to recollect words and thoughts enacted in the past, is always something of a mysterious experience for a writer. The essay 'Breathing and Painting' devoted to Gonn Mosny, and which follows this prefatory text, was written nearly twenty years ago. Thus working on the principle that renewed perception of the past reads the present, as much as the present reads the past, I return self-reflexively to consider my former intimacy with the artist Mosny's work. But more than that I am not only able to have the opportunity to take up and engage with the sculptural works that the artist produced after the former essay was published in 1989, but also take a retrospective view of the entire body of work that Mosny produced during his years in Provence.

The twelve years Gonn Mosny spent in Provence (1985-1997), form as much a period of personal creative embodiment as they do a specific body of work. This is to say by a complete change of environment from Stuttgart (1985) to and isolated house called Fontanille near Gordes specific contraries were engendered. The first and most obvious was the temporal abandonment of the artist's institutional former structures and responsibilities, while the second was that of a near a-temporal immersion and withdrawal into focussed material processes and the simultaneity of being and painting – called at that time simply breathing and painting. Mosny spontaneously travelled from the social and familiar, to a space of solitude and introspection. Having in my own life also passed from the marketplace to the monastery and back again, I felt when writing about Mosny's work in the late 1980s a deeply personal sense of identity and empathy. Hence the distance to my former self only makes an attempt at re-visualising the artist's works all the more enticing.

The processes and methods used by the artist are described hereafter in the essay, and while the paintings remain to me seemingly as elusive and mysterious as ever, my formal evaluation of Mosny's paintings has not changed substantially in the interim – save that my use of language might be somewhat updated if I were writing another long essay about the paintings today. The paintings of Gonn Mosny at that time mediated the space between something that was a field of painterly expression, while at the same time a field or personal space of accumulative daily life. How the artist lived and what he produced in these years was intensely and intimately interconnected. They are paintings of sustained introspection drawing less upon a direct representation of what was immediately around the artist at Fontanille, and more about how Mosny's sensory experience of his immediate environment was used to create a distillation and assimilation of the day to day continuum of sensed environmental moments. Thus the paintings are tableaux of self-reflective inaction as much as material expression. Words like gesture, trace, erasure, or informe remain as fundamental to their viewing as was previously expressed in my original essay. But at the same time seen in retrospect we are now able to see how thoroughly coherent and interrelated each work is as a contained body of expression over the twelve year period in the South of France.

The integrated relationship between the material processes and a life lived does not mean, however, that there was no structure within the time period they were produced by Mosny. The paintings and the drawings created in Provence, are not the product of mere chance. It was the rigorous sense of daily discipline pursued by Mosny that has given the works their coherent quality. But like the so-called psychopathology of solitude itself, the subsequent sculptures after the 1989 publication of 'Breathing and Painting' present a necessary human counterpoint. If Mosny's paintings and drawings are unique poetic forms of gestural interiorisation, the sculptures produced between 1993-95, are elemental exteriorisations. As would be sentinels the sculptures are the realisation of found materials used and adapted to form a ready-made accumulation. The sculptures are a distinct counterpoint as suggested, precisely because they are not about the physical and mental gestures of erasure – paint's addition and subtraction – but conversely a direct material interaction with the Provencal environment in which Mosny found himself. They represent the shift from inwards to outwards, less about distilled interior sensations and more about the direct sensational experience of finding and transposing. Like the analogous binary impulses of sensory reception and transmission, they represent a distinct change of personal emphasis. The works engage with emitting a sense presence, rather than an immersion within a pictorial field.

The sculptures are made of found limestone and sandstone, tufa or calcareous/siliceous rocks, and they are individually complemented by found pieces or wood or house beams (sometimes charred) as their companion element. Thus they combine a sense of the geological and the geographical. The anthropomorphic simile, presented as serried ranks of heads and supports, while not dissimilar to Fautrier's wartime and post-war otages, betoken and express their interventional sense of organic rupture and transposition. They are quite literally taken from the earth, disembowelled and re-embodied with a new existence, geological and organic tokens reconfigured and given not only differentiated life but a new meaning. In consequence they represent issues that are simultaneously primal and poetic. As sentinels, totems, and watchmen, the sculptures are in a state of waiting. What are they waiting for? Like pantheistic presences they are in a state of attendance on the world. If these sculptural works suggest a metaphysical content, or what the artist has called simply 'spiritual', it is certainly not that of the metaphysics of transcendence (the projection of a not here), but rather that that embodies a material immanence, pregnant symbols in waiting that have a singular and collective autonomy while still remaining things unto themselves – a sort of Kantian ding-an-sich as much engage with noumenon as phenomenon. In another sense they also mirror and reflect upon the fact that we are all in a state of immanent waiting for something. Though if we are honest we are never quite certain as to what it is we are waiting for.

As I return whence I began, I am reminded of my own Provence years in the late 1980s and 90s, and the many shared conversations I had with Gonn Mosny at the time of the currently exhibited Provencal works and their production. I thus try to recall to memory and to re-envisage all those countless thoughts and experiences we shared. In the interim of course much is lost, but in a strange way by re-engaging with the same works today something else is discovered, namely that Mosny's art is self-revealing and possesses a strange sense of a-temporality. For while the paintings and sculptures remain substantially as they were in material terms, in immaterial terms it is I who have changed in respect as to how I now experience them. By looking at Mosny's work again I am able to find out that human memory is in fact a polyphonic reality, the past is not just a material archive but an ongoing space of continued creative development and imagination. This is perhaps the truth of Gonn Mosny's paintings, drawings and sculptures, their art does not lie simply in the materials he used, but that they are able to imaginatively re-create themselves anew. Hence they can be not only re-experienced by myself, subject as I am to my own ongoing changes of understanding and perception, but perhaps, more importantly, serve as a continuous visual platform that can be experienced again and again by current and succeeding generations.

©Mark Gisbourne

Monday, 10 March 2008

E.M.Cioran 'On Being Lyrical', On the Heights of Despair, London, Quartet Books, 1995, pp. 3-5 (p. 5) The book was first published in 1934 in Romanian, prior to Cioran's move to Paris in 1937, after which he wrote in French.