©SABOT 2023
RADU COMȘA
CHROMBINATORICS
November 29, 2024 - January 18, 2025
Opening: Friday, November 29, 7pm
For an artist who uses painting-inappropriate tactics in his practice and who claims to be making art even while riding his bicycle, to paint (aka 'to compose') atonally is not unlike denouncing any agreement we might have had with painting throughout its history.
We are in an ambiguous territory, in an area closer to calembour than to representation, where techniques of foreign origin – alliteration, repetition, transcription, permutation, anaphora, counterpoint, and the like – have been added to the textbook. In other words, for a correct reading, we are provided with borrowed tools and encouraged to develop a grammatical relationship with the image.
Forty blindly-colored canvases, belonging to an achromatic scale inspired by disturbed color perception, are folded according to the golden ratio and distributed along the gallery walls. Interrupted by blanks, margins, and ‘punctuation marks’ in places, these chrombinations turn stylistic procedures such as enumeration and repetition into mechanisms for multiplying the resources of the chromatic scale of colors. The total chromaticism towards which this hybrid construction gravitates refers equally to the group theory, to the original meaning of the word archetype (initial model after which copies are made) and to concrete poetry.
This is a concrete poem by Radu Comșa that we might as well call painting.