SELECTED BOOKS AND CATALOGUES
2013
Jerry Zeniuk – elementary painting, Katalog zur Ausstellung 2012 – 2014 in der Staatsgalerie moderne Kunst im Glaspalast Augsburg, eine Zweiggalerie der Pinakothek der Moderne, München, Text von Corinna Thierolf (engl. u. Dtsch).
2008
Jerry Zeniuk – small format, Katalog zur Ausstellung in der Galerie Rupert Walser, München.
2005
Jerry Zeniuk – Farbe in Freiheit, Katalog zur Ausstellung im Kunstverein Lippstadt, Text von Erich Franz.
2003
Jerry Zeniuk, Aquarelle 1974 – 2003, Katalog zur Ausstellung in der Staatlichen Kunsthalle Karlsruhe,Texte von Ariane Mensger und Gert Reising.
2002
Jerry Zeniuk, Prints, Katalog zur Ausstellung der Galerie im Rathaus Wolnzach
Werkverzeichnis der gesamten Druckgrafik 1974 – 2002, Text: Interview zw. Gert Reising, Jerry Zeniuk u. Rupert Walser.
2001
Jerry Zeniuk, Watercolors, Katalog zur Ausstellung des Oldenburger Kunstverein, Text: Interview zw. Corinna Otto u. Jerry Zeniuk
Jerry Zeniuk, Italia, Katalog zur Ausstellung in der Galerie Rupert Walser.
1999
Jerry Zeniuk, Oil and Water, Katalog Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Lenbachhaus München, Kunstsammlungen Cottbus, Texte von Dieter Schwarz, Perdita von Kraft, Marianne Heinz, Ulrich Wilmes, Wilhelm Warning und Jerry Zeniuk, Neue Galerie Kassel.
1996
Jerry Zeniuk, New York – München, Lawrence Markey, New York mit Galerie Rupert Walser, München.
1994
Jerry Zeniuk, Dachaubilder, Neue Galerie Dachau
Jerry Zeniuk, zweiter Katalog, der Galerie Rupert Walser, München.
1993
Jerry Zeniuk, Watercolors 1991/1992, Kuenstlerwerkstatt Lothringerstraße, München.
1991
Jerry Zeniuk, erster Katalog der Galerie Rupert Walser, München.
1990
Jerry Zeniuk, Bilder Paintings 1971-1989, Kunsthalle Bremen, Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Text von Dieter Schwarz und Marianne Heinz dtsch. u. engl.
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Absolute Painting. Giorgio Griffa, Tomas Rajlich, Jerry Zeniuk
Flaminio Gualdoni
“One should remember that a painting, before representing a horse in battle, a nude woman or some anecdote, is in the first place a plane surface covered with colours arranged in a certain order”,1 wrote Maurice Denis in 1890. Shortly before, Paul Sérusier had painted the legendary Le Talisman, which Denis was to own for many years.
This was the first moment when painting realised that it was not a question of a possible abstraction from its highly stratified iconographic tradition either, but of much more: to think of painting as the act of painting, a self-grounded and self-sufficient act. Here became clear what, mutatis mutandis, had already become clear when the Carracci embarked on their career, that is, “a new awareness, which is the critical awareness of the action. In short, what emerged here was an eminently critical conception of the creative act”.2
In other words, the raison d’être of painting is not its subject (what is represented), nor its how (the question of style), but its very existence as an absolute “made by human hand” (cheiropoieton) – in contrast to the myth of the acheiropoieton, the fixation through mysterious metaphysical paths on the image of Christ “not made by human hand”, and therefore fundamentally authentic because not an artefact – that emerges from the lucid process of intellectual scrutiny of its very being as painting.
That something transcends theory itself, divorced from the time-hallowed genealogies, breaking away from them in many ways as it moves towards the goal of a painterly operation that can be called absolute in itself.
This applies to the few, among the protagonists of the extraordinary decade of the 70s, whose trajectory did not stop at New Abstraction, fed as it was by a “conceptual approach to painting”, already grasped by Ben Heller in 1963,3 but was based on emphasising the mentalisation of processes.4 They no longer confronted the problem of non-objective abstraction nor that, which had already been widely explored in many ways, of monochrome,5 but had something else in mind.
On this occasion we present the work of three painters – Giorgio Griffa (1936), Tomas Rajlich (1940) and Jerry Zeniuk (1945) – whose careers spanning several decades have remained faithful to the basic choices, but transcend the specific contingencies of what has been variously called Analytische Malerei, Geplante Malerei, Fundamental Painting, etc., in spite of the fact that they were protagonists in that movement, in their quest for a different possible value of the absolute.6 These artists belonged to the generation that reached maturity at a time when non-representational art was no longer an issue. However, neither did they allow the pictorial object to be reduced to the chill demonstrative exercise of a thought located elsewhere in the version of Conceptualism that tended to prevail initially. Their way of making a painting aimed at an effective and full experience that involved their physical and intellectual totality, obviously free of any irrational tension of Nervenkunst, but understood as an effective moment of listening carefully to the material, space and specific time in which the painterly actions take place.
[...]
Jerry Zeniuk takes the idea of space/colour in a different direction. After his New York début, he presented a personal show in Europe in the Peccolo gallery in Livorno in 1974. The idea of monochrome from which he set out in the mid-70s entailed an intense stratification of pigments and wax, followed by oils, applied with meticulous , deliberate regularity, while leaving visible the aspects of process and systematic questioning (witness Untitled Number 57, 1976, shown the following year in Documenta 6),14 while at the same time seeking to define a suspended chromatic climate, a tone taken to the limits of sensory disquiet. From the end of the 70s, after the stringent definition of the area of the image, the modality of applying the paint began to assume a more sensitive texture in relation to the uniformity of the brushstrokes. At first he introduced subtle variations within an otherwise undifferentiated tone, then created layers of different tonalities, saturating the visual space. Basically, from then on his main concern is to demonstrate the coincidence between a maximum of painterly execution and a maximum of reflection, always maintaining a distance from suggestions such as the objectivity of the “painting as thing” and meditating the fundamental quality of two-dimensionality:
In the last hundred years many painters have experimented with the limits of the plane that contains the image. In logic, something cannot be true and untrue at the same time. In painting, no matter how three-dimensional something is, it wants to be flat and planar – or it shifts into the realm of sculpture […] Painting is true to the plane.15
The basic question is that of vision, of the quality of visual reflection:
If you study painting, you see more. It is not that your eyes have gotten any better, rather it is because you have thought about and reflected on what you have seen. Seeing is a kind of visual thinking.
Therefore he has taken the surface of the painting in its historically sedimented form as a physical space in which actions take place. The application of the colour stains is a sort of regular process fixed in circles and dots of different colours, dimensions, intensities and degrees of precision, which create a complex spatial dimension on the canvas, in some cases of vast dimensions.16
It is not a pre-meditated projection, but a kind of definitive painterly concentration that finds unmediated expression: “Colour releases emotions, and the pictorial space is a non-judgmental place that frames and contains these emotions so they may give access to a universal understanding. A masterpiece never seems to have been painted, but rather to have always existed”. It is both a tangible and a mental presence, both physical and emotional. Above all, it is a definitive, purely self-sufficient experience, “timeless and timely”.
In the work of Griffa, Rajlich and Zeniuk, the critical experience of painting in the very act of painting, free at last of all theoretical and disciplinary trappings, aims to distil and recover its fundamental identity, the degree of autonomous, indefinite but precise incandescence. It is the absolute, or rather the idea of an absolute (if one wishes to avoid, more prosaically, the pertinent but more ambiguous term “beauty”) that skirts around philosophical currents without becoming their mouthpiece, a condition bared in a questioning that stirs a sort of internal and totally autonomous diapason of the painting.
1 “Se rappeler qu’un tableau – avant d’être un cheval de bataille, une femme nue ou une quelconque anecdote – est essentiellement une surface plane recouverte de couleurs en un certain ordre assemblées”: M. Denis, Théories 1890-1910, III ed., Bibliothèque de L’Occident, Paris 1913, p. 1.
2 A. Emiliani, La tecnica di Annibale e di Agostino nel periodo bolognese, in Les Carrache et les décors profanes, Actes du colloque de Rome (2-4 octobre 1986), École Française de Rome, Rome 1988, p. 6.
3Toward a New Abstraction, exh. cat., ed. B. Heller, The Jewish Museum, New York, 1963.
4 Ad Reinhardt, “Twelve Rules for a New Academy”, in Art News, vol. 56, no. 3, May 1957, pp. 37-38, 56, wrote: “Everything, where to begin and where to end, should be worked out in the mind beforehand”.
5 For a comprehensive discussion see D. Riout, La peinture monochrome, revised and expanded edition, Gallimard, Paris 2006.
6 For an excellent survey of this period see I colori della pittura, exh. cat., ed. I. Mussa, Istituto Italo – Latino Americano, Rome 1976.
7 P. Fossati, “Griffa tra empiria e funzionalità”, in Giorgio Griffa, exh. cat., Martano gallery, Turin 1968.
8 G. Griffa in Giorgio Griffa, exh. cat., Claudio Bottello gallery, Turin, April 1975.
9 F. Gualdoni in Giorgio Griffa. “Matisseria” e altri lavori, exh. cat., Martano gallery, Turin, 1982.
10 R. Dippel, in Fundamentele schilderkunst : Fundamental painting, exh. cat., ed. E. De Wilde, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1975.
11Tomas Rajlich, exh. cat., ed. H. Paalman, Schiedams Museum, Schiedam, 1971; Tomas Rajlich, exh. cat., ed. H. Locher, Haags Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, 1971.
12 P. Peters, Struktura nebo poesie?, in Tomas Rajlich : Kesby / Drawings : 1965-1976, exh. cat., Zámek Klenová gallery, Klatovy, 1997.
13 F. Gualdoni, “Pitture di Rajlich”, in Tomas Rajlich. Opere 1969-1993, exh. cat., ed. F. Gualdoni, P. Peters, Nuovi Strumenti, Brescia 1993.
14 Fundamental texts on the works of that period are A. Pohlen, “Jerry Zeniuk: Malerei”, in Kunstforum International, 35, May 1979, and Jerry Zeniuk. Bilder. Paintings. 1971-1989, exh. cat., ed. S. Salzmann, Kunsthalle Bremen, Kunstmuseum Winterthur, 1990.
15 This and the following citations are taken from J. Zeniuk, How to Paint, ed. H. Liesbrock, Sieveking, Munich 2017.
16 Jerry Zeniuk Paintings: Not for your living room, texts by A. Klar, J. Daur, L. Romain, E. Bergner, P. Forster, Kehrer, Heidelberg 2014. For example, in 2001 the artist painted a 4 x 8 m canvas in Mainz.
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The Genoa Local Authority has always shown great dedication to the promotion and diffusion of its cultural patrimony, and has on several occasions in the past had the pleasure of hosting events organised by ABC-ARTE. In this context it is important to mention the solo exhibitions of Giorgio Griffa (Esonare il mondo) and Tomas Rajlich (Fifty Years of Painting), which set out to gain a more in-depth understanding of the works of both artists in the course of their long careers and to introduce them to fellow citizens, students and lovers of contemporary art.
This book and the related exhibition explore the careers of three of the most important exponents of Fundamental or Analytical Painting.
The city of Genoa is also focusing its attention on the appreciation and promotion of its extraordinarily rich landscape and culture for tourists and in the region. The vitality of the cultural attractions of the city is also demonstrated in quality cultural events such as Absolute Painting. This exhibition aims to highlight an important moment of cultural ferment in the aftermath of the Second World War, in which the international avantgardes (Nul, Azimut, Zero among the best-known) were able to develop their own researches and to trace developments that were to become crucial for the history of contemporary and Italian art.
I would like to express my profound gratitude to ABC-ARTE, one of the most authoritative galleries of our city, and to all those who in various ways have made possible the holding of this exhibition in the city of Genoa, the custodian as ever of a vast artistic and cultural heritage.
Marco Bucci
Major of Genova
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ABC-ARTE continues it path of research and in-depth analysis of the theme of painting in the 1970s with the major European avant-gardes and their protagonists. In its endeavour to contradict the death of art and its reflections on the raison d’être of art through the specific act of painting, Analytical Painting successfully established itself internationally with new proposals and a return to the poetry of colour and material.
After the book La Pittura in sé/The Painting itself by the collective of artists consisting of Pino Pinelli, Ulrich Erben and Claude Viallat, that on the personal exhibition of Giorgio Griffa entitled Esonerare il mondo, and Fifty years of Painting on the personal exhibition of Tomas Rajlich, this one compares the parallel trajectories of three artists who have been protagonists of the historical experiences of Fundamental Painting and Radical (or Analytical) Painting.
Giorgio Griffa has a way of painting that puts the emphasis on features that are considered essential such as colour, space and composition. His canvases are free, not confined by the stretcher, ready to conquer the space. In this immediate, essential and luminous representation, Griffa traces lines that go back to the long memory of humankind, kept alive thanks to painting as the link between present and past knowledge.
Rajlich founded the avant-garde Prague group Klub Konkretistů in the wake of the international neo-avant-gardes such as Azimut in Italy and ZERO in Germany, while in the Netherlands he was able to confront the theories of the neo-avant-garde of the Nul group. His works, which are solidly anchored in a quest for the roots of painting, stand out for a materiality that is both symbol and metaphor of physical substance and carefully controlled gesture.
The painting of Jerry Zeniuk first found appreciation in the 1970s after he took part (together with Tomas Rajlich, Jaap Berghuis, Jake Berthot, Louis Cane, Gerhard Richter, Robert Ryman, Kees Smits and others) in the landmark 1975 group exhibition Fundamental Painting in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Colour is the fundamental element in Zeniuk’s painting; physical and visual beauty is the goal. According to the artist, colours are not only bearers of emotions, but their interaction is capable of reflecting social and, more generally, human relations too.
The artists documented in this publication are eloquent examples of an approach that that has gone beyond the artistic developments of the 1970s to become, in its evolution down to the present day, a singular and definitive experience. The thread that connects them is fidelity to painting in the specific essence of the medium, free of all theorisation, to achieve a lofty and resolute degree of mentalisation and operational concentration.
Antonio Borghese
Head consultant & director, ABC-ARTE