Artist's REVIEWS
Art Magazine, By Michael Florescu, June
1981
The debasement of gold not the exclusive responsibility
of financiers and politicians. Artists, too, share the blame. Since Giotto,
say, in the West, gold, the most ductile of all the elements, has, over
the years, come to be employed primarily for its superficial characteristics.
The glitz and glitter of much punk and "new wave" art activity is for
some the only experience of what was once the accepted visual element
for the expression of spirituality.
It is important to remember this because
gold pigment (and to a lesser degree, silver and bronze and mother-of
pearl) is an integral part of Helmut Amann's new pieces. And he employs
it in a manner that suggests that he, for one, is mindful of its real
significance. He employs gold not as embellishment or cosmetically,
but as content. Epitome of the rare and precious, gold is almost infinitely
capable, both in actuality and in a metaphysical sense, of transformation.
Which is why it has always been the element par excellence for the accommodation
of the spiritual. Amann knows this instinctively. The shaping of his
non-rectilinear canvases has evidently not been arbitrary; it has been
to accommodate the curvilinear band of gold, which is the dominant feature
of his compositions. Moon on Jerusalem is an excellent example of his
method. An irregular hexagon, this painting, like all of the pieces
in his current series, deals not merely in spatial illusion, in the
relationship between depth and shallowness, but in the tensions between
contraction and expansion, between transmitted and reflected light.
Despite the ambiguity of the forms brought
into being and shaped by these tensions, despite the fact that each
of them may be interpreted visually in more ways than first meets the
eye (the way often determined by the angle at which the light falls
on it), every one without exception represents the principle of the
open box. Ordinarily, one thinks of a box as an object for the containment
of another object or objects. The quality and condition of the objects
contained sometimes, but not the translation of corporeal reality into
the realm of the divine, they had at the same time to serve for the
containment of the spirit until the completion of its passage to the
domain of the irreal. The supreme effect of the use of gold by the ancient
Egyptians was to make an unmistakable distinction between the two elements.
Thus was the virtue of inequality made manifest.
In our own day, the otherworldly properties
of gold, properly employed, can be in no way denied. Amann, by introducing
this magical element into the matrix of geometric illusion, is drawing
our attention to, and throwing into high relief, the minimalist tradition
from which this, his latest work, developed. By introducing the magical
element to the minimalist structure, Amman is demonstrating that the
single most important characteristic of that structure was its emotional
denial and its celebration of sensory deprivation.
The introduction of one element, even the
richest of all the elements, into the being of another may by itself
do no more than suggest potential for change. But Amann has done more.
He has employed the vernacular of geometric illusion to enact the drama
of sequence of the passage of one medium through another. Metaphorically,
it is the inevitable consequence of the collision of disparate cultures.
The disparate cultures Amann has actualized are inherent and visible
in the works themselves. The box-like illusions, which are the works,
are his versions of the reliquary. Amann's reliquaries differ essentially
from the reliquaries we are accustomed to in that his serve as repositories
not of the flesh but of the spirit. The literally outlandish shapes
of Amann's illusionary boxes can be seen to transform themselves as
a consequence of the light reflected off them. And the light they transmit
is a consequence of the light that is reflected.
To claim a religious intent on behalf of
this most interesting artist would be to do him a disservice. Yet the
intimations of the ineffable are not to be denied. The very least of
his accomplishments to date is to render to the impersonal manifestations
of geometry, and geometrical illusion a flavor of the personal; the
irregularity and asymmetry of his canvases and the painterly surface
of their would-be solid faces powerfully suggest the affirmation of
an individual and vulnerable spirit.