Every Cause Produces an Optical Effect

Every Cause Produces an Optical Effect

1 October – 30 November 2014 curated by Alberto Zanchetta

Jorrit Tornquist

Every Cause Produces an Optical Effect

Bernard Maitte asked himself how it is that colours possess “un’esistenza propria quando manifestano una tale variabilità?”. Josef Albers confirms it for us, writing in one of his books: “nella percezione visiva un colore non viene quasi mai visto come è nella realtà fisica. Questo fa sì che il colore sia il mezzo più relativo in campo artistico”. Jorrit Tornquist too has questioned himself and has come to a decision in that sense. Since there are no wrong questions or answers more right than others (given that there are only discordant circumstances), the artist has sought to experience, to interpret and to rework the sense data in his possession. From this derives an apparently irreconcilable polarity, the one that sets “organic colours” against “cultural colours”. In practice Tornquist has arrived at pictorial compositions which are in reality chromatic and material [de]compositions. And not by chance, because matter is the only thing capable of making colour visible.

Tornquist conceives colour as electromagnetic frequency and light as a vehicle of information as well as of sensation; it follows that in interpreting matter-as-world the artist does nothing other than sound the “tonal scale of the feelings” (not a chromatic spectrum but, as he would put it, an orchestral one). In the second half of the Sixties, Tornquist abandons formal scientism to devote himself to a sensory aesthetic. From theories he passes into the world of unwritten rules, which is to say he passes from motivations to emotions. The artist writes in 1977: “il colore comunica i sentimenti tramite la strada diretta della percezione sensitiva senza la necessità di dover ricorrere alla coscienza. Il colore agisce sui sentimenti e così influenza il nostro stato biologico”. Tornquist’s chromatic-emotive investigations take in the world that surrounds us, with its transparencies, dissolves, saturations, vibrations. Time and again the artist has drawn inspiration from atmospheric effects, which generate a “filter” through which we apprehend – rather than identify – colour. See in this regard the polyptych Quattro stagioni of 1974, in which the artist associates winter-spring-summer-autumn with as many natural suggestions, each of them codified according to the painter’s palette. We know well how changeable the perception of one and the same landscape can be, at different times of the year as in particular weather conditions or according to our own psycho-physical state. The summer heat, bad weather, the level of pollution, during states of altered consciousness, in full light or in the cones of shadow, in the morning when we are rested and alert, or in the evening when the sight is tired: these are some of the cases investigated by Tornquist. As though to say that to every cause there corresponds an [optical] effect.

Tornquist’s works give us back a memory, a climate, an atmosphere. Obviously the artist has not confined himself to a logico-sensory geometry in order to convert the visible into chessboard or starburst, into modules or sequences, into emissions or propagations; the artist has also converted colour into a living space, putting the visual into relation with the liveable, the essential with the existential. His first environmental-urban intervention dates from 1966, the first of a long series intended to make architecture less heavy, immersing it in light-colour. Not content with that, Tornquist has sublimated relative reality into dual relation: to the viewer his centrality is reassigned, the role of perceiving subject who contributes to completing the work. Just like the colours, the viewer too becomes “complementary” to art.

Within the broad range of stimuli-situations that the world holds in store for us, perception can only be subjective, influenced by individual experience, by prior judgements or situations, by one’s own emotional and psychological state. Every perception is a case in itself; we might equally assert that every perception is singular in its plurality. This holds for these works too, in which the colours appear and dissolve, fade or quicken. They are lucent, resplendent, opaque, indistinct. Jorrit Tornquist is a hunter of rainbows who has candidly admitted: “Io proprio non so spiegarvi come lavoro”. Now then, why should we strain to understand him? If the artist wants to recover an emotional intelligence of his own, we too must do the same. It is not indispensable to understand, but it is fundamental to perceive.