Page 26 - Studio International - July 1966

Four aspects of But Agam's use of aesthetic 'absence', closely inter- Aesthetic transformability is a considerable step forward
Nouveau solfège related in practice and theory, has a very special flavour. in the liberation and transcendence of the image as pre-
(New solfa) 1966
Metapolymorphic painting The French Dictionary of Aesthetics defines 'absence' as viously defined by Gabo, who proclaimed that the artist
Oil on corrugated aluminium `not a simple void of Being: it is constituted and felt hic should no longer make images of Nature but images on to
39 3/8 x 39 3/4 in.
et nunc like some sort of working operation of the negative'. it. According to Gabo, only after the fusion of conceptual
This perceptibility of the aesthetic absence and in parti- and perceptual images can the artist build 'blocks of our
cular the aesthetic image can be explained by Agam's consciousness and in their entirety constitute that which
personal interpretation of the image and its negation. In we call reality'.
a recorded statement, Agam says: 'In my works, I tried Agam's art could be considered as a fundamental
to give a sense of an image which goes beyond the visible.' development of ideas Gabo and Moholy-Nagy formu-
In fact, for him the image does not exist—it exists only lated in the early twenties. With the active participation
as virtuality which disappears, 'sometimes never to come of the spectator, Agam makes the image appear and dis-
again and sometimes to come again with other new appear at will, and the disappearance of the form gives
combinations'. way to the aesthetic appearance of movement.