Exhibition Notes: Vera Molnár

[Visited 6 March 2024]

The clean and confusing lines of Vera Molnár.

Vera Molnár was born in Hungary, migrating to France 1947. She lived to be 100, continuing to make art in her nursing home. 

She said she works between three “cons”  – constructionism, the conceptual and the computer (n, m — pretty close). 

She was the first artist in France to make computer assisted drawings but before this she was employing her own alogorithmic method that she called her “imaginary machine”.

She takes simple forms — geometries, letters — and works with increasingly deforming or bending them through gradual permutations.

She talks of one of her earliest memories of doing this. Having a set a of pastels with her on summer holidays and drawing the same scene every day, using the same four colours for land water and sky. But she realised that she would use up these colours before the end of the holiday and – so she systematically then moved to the four colours to the left and used them, then the four to the right, creating a set of colour based permutations. 

A line that jumps, slides, gropes, hops, pushes, flees, corrects itself, falls, falters, turns, bypasses, stumbles, crawls, slides, rolls, sinks, collapses, starts again and continues senslessly over and over again.

Vera Molnár, A Line.

The pieces that most attract me are her works directly on walls that utilise my own current visually fetishes — nail and string work and long graphic wall pieces. Molnár is focused on the eye not the ear and she is working with permutations of the letter W, attracted by its angles, but nonetheless it is reminiscent of a messy triangle sound wave. 

Why do I like such clear geometries and their permutations? Is it a comfort to see order, then order disintegrating in a kind of orderly fashion. Is it a false sense of security? Or is it simple a visual aesthetic that then has understandable rules, and I like discovering the rules? 

Some I know would be deeply distrusting of her trust in numbers and algorithms — that it is against nature. But to go all Nietzschian, algorithms are part of nature. Is it enough to say if it exists then it is part of nature? We are part of nature and if we have invented it, is it not too part of nature?* It’s how we use it — using our tools to be destructive of other parts of nature, or constructive to create objects of sensory beauty. That is why I like this work. It comes from computation but it gives sensory pleasure — the feeling of being drawn into a geometry and a process of change that feels potentially unknowable yet understandable in its patterned progression nonetheless. **

* I found myself making this argument in the Resonant Futurs Roundtable as well. That perhaps if we accepted our technologies as part of our nature instead then we might used them differently, to better ends. It’s a theory in process.

** Another joy of French Netflix was an old documentary on Benoit Mandelbrot, Mr Fractal – a rebel mathematician and admirable transdisciplinarist who had a kind of sixth sense for geometries, saw and felt all things as geometries. 

Image: Vera Molnár, OTTWW, 1981-2010