subscribeAntoni Gaudi: Trencadis, A Project for Artforum, by Ellsworth Kelly
by Nancy Cantwell
Currently on exhibition at the Académie de France à Rome – Villa Medici is an extraordinary pairing of artists, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Ellsworth Kelly. While the most immediate choice of comparisons would be of a formalist concern, this exhibition which includes new works by Kelly and the Portrait de Desdéban (ca 1810, Musée of Besançon), painted in the Villa Medici, by its former director, Ingres, the Académie is stressing a more viseral approach “…the visitors’ eye and spirit will successively be confronted to one artist and then to the other, in such a way that the memory of one inhabits the look upon the other and vice-versa.” Currated by Ellsworth Kelly and Éric de Chassey, the current director of the French Academy in Rome, the exhibition is organized around three aspects shared by both Kelly and Ingres, a connection of outline and form, serialism and the search for the “good form” and the duality between fragmentation and unity. Ah, to be summering in Italia!
Seeing notice of the above show prompted me to revisit another Kelly pairing, Antoni Gaudi: Trecadis, A Project for Artforum, by Ellsworth Kelly. Trencadis is a Catalan word used to describe a type of mosaic composed of broken shards of discarded tile reconfigured and repurposed to decorate buildings (a comparible process to the French, pique assiette). I have been hanging on to these remarkable mosaic reproductions that Kelly had produced in honor of the great Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi (1852-1926) first because I loved the domestic reference. Perhaps I could try my own hand at such a task? But, secondly, because there seemed such disparity between these trencadis arrangements and the minimalist abstractions I’ve long associated with Kelly’s art. So un-Kelly like. And as the Viila Medici exhibition digs into the past for fresh interpretations, so a revived historical forage (on my part) has made the connection now quite clear to me. I would venture to say the first impulse came from Kelly’s military experience when in 1943 he was inducted in the US Army where, at his request, he was assigned to the camouflage unit. Much the same as Richard Avedon honed his initial photographic eye taking identity pictures during his service in the Merchant Marines (1942), Kelly had ample time to spend in contemplation of the rearrangement of form and perceptual ambiguities. More to the point, his miltary experience afforded him the ability to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. In Paris, Kelly would now come into close contact with the work of Pablo Picasso who became a profound initial influence. In his book Barcelona, the critic Robert Hughes quotes Ellsworth Kelly’s observation that Gaudi’s trencadis – the fragmented mosaics he used to create shimmering surfaces on solid architectural mass – had a profound effect on Picasso’s fragmented forms. The provenance of inspiration and continuity of vision that permeates these splendid Kelly trencadis is explicit…and so very Kelly-like after all.
Please click to enlarge.
