Oran Hoffmann à Aix

Written by Patrick Healy

F.I.U. Amsterdam | 2018 Oran Hoffmann à Aix

Written by Patrick Healy

F.I.U. Amsterdam | 2018 1

Thanks to the three different exhibitions In that undertaking he has gone of Oran Hoffmann (born 1981) taking beyond indexing and archiving to show place in Aix in September of this year how constructive and deconstructive (2018), one at the Atelier Cezanne, seeing, his own decade-long research another at Fondation Vasarely, and on perception and responding to one at La Non-Maison, one can say art practise itself, has lead, as will that every surprise at any, or each one, be shown, to an expansive and an of the exhibitions confirms what has emancipatory achievement. Not unlike become increasingly apparent in the his last major museum exhibition in trajectory of Hoffmann’s development Tel Aviv, Hoffmann responds to, enters as an artist since graduating from into visual dialogue with specific the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, works, in that case of the artist Josef and his later studies at the Bezalel Albers, and wrests from these his own Academy in Jerusalem, in the Master independent fashioning and highly of Fine Arts programme, where he individual and recognisable style. In this graduated summa cum laude. case in Aix, he continues and refines that first great dialogue and now with In these three shows his increasing the work of Vasarely and Cezanne, preoccupations and achievements as and a single manifestation at La Non- an artist become more legible. It is Maison, often described as a micro- a work involved with the signature of centre for cultural experimentation. things as much as persons. There is much subtle thinking, and ingenious transformations, which has been a feature of his personal development since his graduation days. The detailed research and response he makes are a result of careful preparation, and the current shows have involved him in working and living in Aix for the best part of a year. As we will see, he has literally spent hundreds of hours working through material in the Fondation Vasarely, living on site to progress his ideas further. 2

The exhibition in Tel Aviv was a The title of the show, Objektiv, points mature statement, if you like, or the to an outstanding paradox, namely way-station at which Hoffmann had that the very lens which adds to the arrived. It was labelled as a ‘two- claim of photography as rendering the person’ show and given the title objective world, points to the reality Objektiv. The remarkable fact of the of the subjective, and the point of exhibition was how Hoffmann would view. In literature the phenomenon literally engage in a de-structuring of intertextuality is well documented, and response that was constructive and in art-historical study much of the and developed a kind of constitutive tracking of sources and influences can seeing where with the deceased be seen as a recognition of the ‘inter- artist Josef Albers he forms a living iconic’, which for some challenges partnership and dynamic exchange. the view of creation as necessarily original, and for others indicates the By a process of selection and shifting ancestral claims that can free and of observation viewpoints, a playful empower creative, artistic work. So, and inventive group of works emerged. too, in Aix Hoffmann continues with One can speak of inter-iconic exchange. his working through and responding This inter-iconicity pointed to a to earlier artistic work, seizes the community of concern, as much as conjunction of Cezanne/Vasarely, and any issue of facts. There is a hazard in in a third show at La Non-Maison. such an undertaking, as the past can literally overwhelm those who do not approach it with great respect. For Hoffmann the artist is still alive and available for dialogue in his works.

Objektiv: Wood Print Linoleum, Plexiglass (Yellow and Blue), C-print, 80 x 64 cm, 2014 Blocknote, C-print, 70 x 56 cm, 2014 7

It is necessary to review Hoffmann’s Given the range of his, it would be earlier sojourn. Although born in Israel, best to say, topics, and his fascination Hoffmann spent most of his formative with imaging already existing images years in Holland, and had made his from book illustrations, film posters, the choice to study photography at the fascination also with the way of looking: prestigious Rietveld Academy. the set-up of the image and awareness During his undergraduate years his work of its destination and so forth, his was already noted for the combination work was seen to epitomise strong of technical precision and the unusual currents which were emerging from choice of subject matter, which in one the Academy at that time (between compelling set of images consisted 2000-2006), and both he and his of photographs from illustrations of contemporaries were critically treated a bison and a hare published in an in the Dutch context as ‘conceptualists’. old book of ‘natural history’. With the graduation exhibition, one sees the The complex tensions between various interests he had developed, and landscape, nature and objects are held the strong relation to the problem of together through works that insist on the artefact, to the process of making. their own artefactual existence; the examples are Three Trees, Fabeln, and Hoffmann had travelled to Israel in Habseligkeiten, with its precise interest the same year as completing his in ornament, repetition and optical preparations, 2006, mostly visiting illusion. Rather than thinking of the archaeological sites, both ancient and artist as moving from one set of topics modern, covering the whole land from or thematic to another, thus marking North to South, taking photographs of some idea of ‘progress’, it is better Beit She’an in the north and Caesarea to see how the various tendencies in the South, including the Nabatean already shown in his early work gain site of the remains of Avdot on the traction and become more intensely old Petra-Gaza road – a site that was focused as his range of experience heavily vandalised three years later. and life lived goes on. In one sense there is a line forward in terms of lived directionality, and yet in another there are circles of repetition that turn and turn about like an expanding spiral.

Habseligkeiten, C-print, 80 x 64 cm, 2006 8

But no amount of intellectual rigour He also understood that photography can keep the image made from its abandons an image to its own fate, own object status, its life literally, as and restores the objective as intensely a thing in the very Nachleben of contingent. In whatever way illusions reception, and every reception of an are orchestrated, the photographic image had to leave open the openness object must endure its existence it engendered. In a very frank avowal as surface, and as carrier of the of intention and also of freedom visible, which can include darkness from a single label, for example and light. The image of the hare ‘conceptual artist’, Hoffmann created and bison were both in black and both ambivalence and persistent white. In one of the tendencies his ambiguity in his work. He did not view commitment to the story, or fabel, can himself as anything or anyone other be seen. There are inevitable symbolic than a working artist who engaged resonances; one could, for example, with the medium of the photographic point to two explicit examples of and not only as an end in itself. artists working in the Netherlands at the time of his graduation, namely The choice of a new photographic Joseph Semah and Hilarius Hofstede. image, the creation of another object, of something already made, a

photograph of a photograph, points Fabeln; Bison, black and white pigment print, 120 x 90 cm, 2006 on one hand to an acknowledgement of his art inspired by traditions, and on the other to a double gesture towards his position with regard to image making. He accepted ‘ready- made’ work, and indicated in that choice his awareness of the complex interplay between the enabling object and the simulations and illusions the play of subject and object involved. 10

The image pair also pointed to a subtle Hoffmann was a student who iconographical source, which in the acknowledged the work of his case of the hare was directly taken up teachers, and especially that of by the artist Joseph Semah, who has Johannes Schwartz, part of whose in his work explored the relationship teaching emerged directly from his of the hare and persecution in the own practise and was concerned with Diaspora. The bison was deployed as unusual aspects of the neglected a powerful image in the major project everyday, and the high-end cultural initiated by the Dutch artist Hilarius locations such as museums as a setting Hofstede, under the title The Bison for art and the viewing of art; his Caravan, which has resulted in major projects ranging from shepherds huts, group shows on this single theme in garden sheds to viewing Vermeer at Marseille, Mali, Brazil and Amsterdam. the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. One Hoffmann contributed to the show could certainly speak of a search with his poetic and memorable for ‘profane illumination’, as defined image, during the Tierrafino hosting by Walter Benjamin in his essay of the caravan in Amsterdam (2014). on Surrealism. The strong optical obsession within the Dutch tradition was often engaged in releasing a beauty from the banal, of bringing light out of darkness. The highly wrought consideration of process and the history of photography exhibited a strong paradox, that of purity and a kind of innocence in the creation of the new object, itself not a reference to something total, but another fragment another salvaging of appearance.

Fabeln; Hare, black and white pigment print, 120 x 90 cm, 2006 Puzzle, C-print, 100 x 80 cm, 2005 Blocks, C-print, 100 x 80 cm, 2005 17

With his return to study in Jerusalem, Hoffmann has taken the various Hoffmann would expand his range dilemmas that have haunted the of activities and engage much more debates around photography and art, directly with theoretical concerns the relation of reality and the image and with himself. The return to Israel subjective/objective distinction, and also granted him new opportunities; transformed and shape-shifted them with a studio of his own, a situation to the places of surplus and imaginary emerged where he could invite visits conversation with other artists and and criticism from a range of highly the photographic tradition, leading engaged teachers, among whom to new creations of sculptural and Nahum Tevet, Raphael Zagury-Orly, architectural elements that challenge Sarit Shapira and Moshe Ninio. one to think about his precise and very sensitive registration of the intense Students learn as much from each information that is light and of objects other as from their best teachers, that increasingly assemble as things. who teach students mostly how to He stages a masterly hey presto of the learn. The intellectual atmosphere and various dichotomies in manifestations encouragement to advance thinking which he construes inevitably as a and making together was for Hoffmann form of punctuated expression and an exciting intensification of what he also as a form of self-disappearance had already attained in Amsterdam, and movement to impersonality. and the further impetus of renewing his relation to speaking Modern Hebrew and expanding his horizons. Tel Aviv as a dynamic and welcoming environment also gave him contact with collectors and curators, who in this period had replaced the ‘critic’ in terms of setting the direction of art and exhibition goals. Artists increasingly needed to develop their own critical skills, the courage to ‘kill their darlings’ in order to avoid having works preferred by the collector beginning to dominate the direction of their output. It was not an easy balancing act.

Le Cinquième Mur, C-print, 80 x 64 cm, 2014 18

In one sense the tracking of Hoffmann In some of his earliest photographs indicates an artist of settled convictions the human is placed in an isolation of and patient and systematic searching space, where the bright mind of the through photography for rest, silence, creator seems to whisper in the ear the appearance of things, surfaces, of the viewer, and the word is passed shine and lustre. It is a purity and on from one person to the next, or a innocence won with the most artificial profound trace actually stops pointing and self-conscious means, a kind of to some absence which must be freshness that one finds in the early pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle greens of Spring. It is an innocence and bestows ineluctably a capacity to born of great knowledge, and not of call to mind the urgent reality of limits an unknowing ignorance, and it is a of the human condition, because it knowledge that knows so much of the is finite. One may refer to his image random and limits that it seeks nothing of the child’s cradle. That image is more than to be part of that flow: also one from 2005, and has had it is the precariousness of the world. great resonance for his own artistic struggles. There is no tumult, nor a heart-rending cry. The shelter of the new-born and its confining pen, is a stark silent object that points to the mystery of how we come into the world, linger and one day leave.

The Schnoz, C-print, 125 x 100 cm, 2010 21

The camera obscura and the coffin are The image is equally that of a little fatally conjugated in this remarkable black box surmounted by a draped apposition in naming and image. curtain whose kink gives the impression Indeed his idea of the ‘black box’ as of a Baroque baldacchino, and it the complete event of record and forestalls the direction of memory container of information would indicate because it joins it directly to the to him a new declination of the dream, as image. Hoffmann is also past/future in different unexpected alluding to the daguerreotype, and tenses and moods, a way of making to a time when image making image and word, thought and action was literally slower. Thanks to the more personal even as it became extraordinary work of David Hockney something whose efficacy and such preoccupation suddenly, and quality was held in the statement, if almost simultaneously, seemed less asked about work: ‘heaven knows. against the contemporary grain than might otherwise have been the case. ’The ‘black box’ from 2005 is the Artists were now fully engaged with presage of much that is to come. An photography and re-thinking the image has held time in a form of practice of artists and the relation of luminous appearance, and risks what art to techne in a very direct way. cannot be said. The instant holds on to its own vanishing point and keeps appearance safe, in some sense images are the capture of other images seen as scintillations of the object, a kind of endless fata morgana where the vibration of energy generates in the subject the capture of a capture, and thus captured; it is we who are captivated.

Blackbox, black and white pigment print, 35,5 x 28 cm, 2005 22

One can say that the speed of There are complex illusions in such capture of an image from the complex ‘eidolapoesis’ that puzzled Walter emanation of the material world is Benjamin in his theory of the ‘dialectical a matter of persuasive archaeology. image’, which is worth dwelling on It is no accident that the artist is for a moment. In the Arcades Project directly interested in the same period (Das Passagen-Werk), Benjamin has of his work with archaeological sites as outlined in his various exposés a and geological stratifications; one section on photography, which for can mention his photographs of the the most part interrogates and cites Negev desert and the direct focus approvingly the then unpublished on archaeological finds on which he manuscript of Gisèle Freund on concentrates. Thus a struggle takes photography and society and points to place between a technical apparatus the complex way in which the speed that slowly develops and composes of the image can erupt as the now the image with that of a perception moment of the historical. of the moment given in, for example, flash photography. The struggle is not between a version of greater or lesser representational realism, of art and photography; rather the tool and the moment are both saturated in a perceptual composing which is a capture as eruption into image.

Perception too is layered, and instead of trying simply to assemble Gedächtnisbilder (memory images), the interrogation of the very nature of layering in the strata of things as their concretion and assemblage of image moving at speed, the perceptual layer coincides and finds the moment of image which creates rest and silence, which gathers the illusions and allows one pause.

ate, black and white pigment print, 3 x 2 cm, 200 24

The way of viewing the image and In Benjamin there is a form of strange material resonance inevitably makes distribution of animistic thinking, a on think that it seems as if the image magic on one hand that has been lost is indeed formed, or moulded by time because of means of reproducibility, and this makes of it an archaeological and on the other hand which he moment. In some way one can also insists stays in objects in different say time is the speeding image itself. ways, so that the ghostly life of the After all the speedy image being early photographic images, which ‘expurgated’ from the object is also have longer exposure time, somehow perceived without its past or the void opens up a realm of phantom-like spaces it creates, and is thus, as it and uncanny presence where one can were, deliberately stratified: time is the say ‘things look’. It may be that this speeding of the image itself. Here the universal perception can be traced perceptual is action at a nearness to to the work of Leibniz, and inevitably the image, being itself as much image one finds that all distinctions between – degree zero – as what is said to be of the animate and the inanimate are of the object. But the realm of the object infinitely subtle gradation if they can be is not neutral, nor indeed that of things. maintained at all.

Glass on Glass, C-print, 50 x 40 cm, 2012 An Unkown Collection, C-print, 125 x 100 cm, 2010 Bilder Fleck, C-print, 70 x 56 cm, 2011 Planes, C-print, 100 x 80 cm, 2008 31

In one image of a mound in the Negev, Even in the desert the earth is fecund. actually the groundwork done at the It is really in the notion of composing beginning of a building project which and de-composing process and are called ‘pillars’ and a temporary production via technique that Hoffmann recording of depth tracks, entitled finds the impetus for his way of layering Exhumed Arrangements (2009), and converting realities, so out of a Hoffmann finds in the travail of the particular optical treatment the play of earth itself structure and explosion light and shadow, as viewed, becomes simultaneously, which points to his a crystalline source for a new sense own fascination with the land of his of space and register of forms. In the birth, ever old/ever new. This jutting previous year, as with the graduation up out of the earth resembles the show, one finds a threefold prong way in which time past also juts of direction with the works Stripes, into the present and explodes an Planes, and Stones of Remembrance, image, which is memory and present the latter being the indication of the simultaneously. It is the shock of appearance of a Gedächtnisbild, so the classical and the deep issue of called, and within the cultural injunction modernity combined: how the past and ‘Remember’, which is the tradition the present are a future constellation. that creates itself in its own activity.

Exhumed Arrangement #3, C-print, 80 x 60 cm, 2009 Incipient Type #6, C-print, 100 x 80 cm, 2016 35

In Benjamin’s writing this process There is a further consequence in that of layering, the relation of the the notion of a bare particular, which photographic and the archaeological, is given as the singulum tantum, also the creator of images can be raises the issue of matter as being specifically seen in section Y of the capable of thinking, since the way Arcades Project, where a fundamental images are generated means we are encounter is given as the interest even in consciousness the play of image one has in early photographs, that of grasped as a temporal concreteness machine and man ([Y4a, 3], p. 678) and directed in certain ways. Such a Nadar reproduces the Balzacian theory radical materialism may lie close to the of the daguerreotype which in turn idea of Benjamin that the regime of the derives from the Democritean theory visible is not about the sighted alone, of the eidola ([Y2a,1,] p. 674). Benjamin but belongs as much to the irradiation has made a purposeful connection, of image on image from atomic activity. but denies that Nadar was aware of the complex provenance of Balzac’s Benjamin cites a passage from Balzac’s account of the daguerreotype. The cousin Pons: ‘If we consider only the response of Nadar to Balzac may be practical side of divination, then to seen in a passage from Nadar’s 1899 believe that previous events in a man’s ‘Quand j’étais photographe’. There life … can be directly represented by Nadar also shows how a certain aporia the cards he shuffles and cuts (…) is to was reached in his communication believe the absurd (…) If anyone had with Balzac, since he treats of the come and told Napoleon that a man daguerreotype as that which layers. or a building is incessantly, and at all Nadar says that Balzac’s theory is that hours, represented by an image in the every body in nature is composed atmosphere, that all existing objects of a series of spectres, in infinitely have there a kind of spectre which can superimposed strata, foliated in be captured and perceived, he would infinitesimal foils. There is loss in have consigned him to Charenton as a transmission of some of the spectral, lunatic. and Nadar wonders if there is then some gain through the photographic process itself. What becomes clear is that image generates image, and that the notion of eidola is tied to perceptual activity as much as to atomic movement, or object fulguration.

Incipient Type #5, C-print, 100 x 80 cm, 2016 Circles of Confusion; Blue, C-print, 100 x 80 cm, 2015 39

’In Benjamin the different meditations Carl Einstein, in his novella Bebuquin, on children’s books, especially those sees the modern technology of called trick books, or about the electrical lighting as leading to intense phantasm of the collector in relation to optical fragmentation and a tripping, an object which is, literally, his whole hallucinative pressure on the senses. world, the accumulation of kitsch Benjamin has a didactic mission, and bric-à-brac that was intensified by an agenda for revolution, that has to the phenomenon of luxury capitalist do with the very way one needs to accumulation, where objects were just break with the giving oneself totally to pell-mell and clamouring for attention, the commodity – which in a powerful literally overpowering the subject in metaphor is the whoring of things as a the incessant demand for the ‘new’ fatuous empathy. The problem of the of fashion, the phenomenon of mass loss of experience, its poverty, and the production, of vulgarity and cheapness elimination of the human sensorium, that seemed like a carousel in a Luna made film the new art of the masses, Park, heralded the collapse of the deployed for distraction and even the subject and the deadly impoverishment denigration of the power of the image. of human experience, and in his analysis displayed the true dilemma that emerged from the onslaught of the capitalist dream market.

Arbitrary Formation #02, C-print, 70 x 56 cm, 2014 40

Imagining one’s own space of things, A question arises in considering challenging through perceptual action the the problem of the object which is very appearance of things, and objects, germane to Hoffmann’s explorations, would be a necessary emancipatory goal from landscape views that are divided of artistic life. Touching and seeing the by a tree or a stark red column, of haptic and the optical, needed to be a set-up of a still life which uses bridged, in a way that a form of touch repetition as the idea of mirroring was a real perceptual gain. We still need displaced from the task rendering to think much more closely about what a ‘real’, of assemblages which risk Benjamin meant when he remarked ‘old every kind of strangeness in the way photographs not old drawings have a archaeologists have to look increasingly ghostly aspect’ (Passagen Werk [K2a-1], at the culturally produced artefact and p.393). The idea of the gaze that rests its exhibition, and think, and in the on things, mentioned by Proust, or the example of small perfume containers notion that within the very realm of the found in graves as status deposits, or visible looking exists throughout, thus the technically accomplished fine ware, an concept of a thing ‘looking back’ as the offering to the divinity, a deposition gaze is returned, or of the objectification with the dead, the whole after-life of of the sense of being looked at, where which the explorer becomes a part. one is somehow ‘petrified’ belongs to the real way in which the gaze is given to the realm of the ‘fascinating’, and this fascination can have deadly and violent consequences in the capture of things. There is no innocent look, there is no possibility of complete transparency that does not simply become invisible. Struggling to see in more dimensions requires the further deployment of illusions and not their unmasking; they have to be activated to the last cry, before some real clearing and truth of appearance can come into being, and it is with finding that clearing that Hoffmann is most vividly concerned. It is the open space where the truth and the real occurs.

Gambit #2, C-print, 80 x 64 cm, 2012 43

There is no object in general, the field It is necessary to try and grasp the between production and consumption work in Tel Aviv as it also indicates the as a social fact entails meanings which fruit of Hoffmann’s more theoretically create meaning, and in some cases oriented studies in the Bezalel and his through concentration and abstraction ‘coming of age’ as an artist with a solo an object that is both sign and exhibition in Tempo Rubato gallery the signified, which can only be understood same year. He had been awarded the adequately in terms of the ritual Young Artist Award in 2013 from the practises that adhere to it. In what has Israel Ministry of Culture, and was a been called the new archaeology, a recipient of funding from the Mondriaan sophisticating of view on the status of Fund in the Netherlands (2007). As an cultural object. artist he had both the independence and circumstances to explore his Benjamin shared with Agatha Christie own world in more and more detail. the conviction that archaeology and A remarkable work, Model on Model: the detective shared common goals. Orrery, shown in New York at this time, In the 19th century archaeology in is the image that has prepared for the German speaking lands became the work he has so steadfastly pursued in high prestige activity for defining Aix, and is especially evident in the education and culture. It was always Fondation Vasarely show. a matter of traces and induction, processes of relations indicated that the subjectivity of the searcher is the form of the mute object, in the act of interpretation. Things are related to things, and objects to other objects; they are internal relations and contextual through and through. There is no natural, given, unit for data; things are chosen, assembled and re-contextualised.

A Model of a Model: Orrery #1, C-print, 100 x 80 cm, 2014 44

The curator of the show Objektiv, who In Aix then we find the artist at work also supplied an essay, emphasised on three different sites, and twice in the image/perception dichotomy for response to important artistic legacies the artist working with photography. and to the land of his birth. It remains Photography in Hoffmann is abstract to be shown how he has connected his in the sense that there is always a previous directions in this rich context reference to the medium as a means of involvements, places of devoted to study reality and as a vehicle homage and highly independent of research at the same time. The creation. The artist has literally taken question in the encounter between on the major project of responding Albers and Hoffmann is observation to the significance of the whole with, and not of and through. Thus development of ‘modernity’, as much a the question ‘how does one see with phenomenon of artistic life and work in a square?’ Both the issue of image Provence, as in Paris, Vienna, Moscow. making and the question of point of view is a constant in his explorations. This still remains moot when we turn to consider the individual exhibition responses.

l’Atelier vu à travers un Miroir, C-print, 70 x 56 cm, 2017 l’Atelier vu à travers un Miroir, C-print, 70 x 56 cm, 2017 48 49

No one who visits Aix can fail to be Even in the age of digital fabrication In the atelier today there remains some It became of enormous interest to aware of the almost cultic presence and 3D printing, the importance to books, of which a volume of Virgil is a Hoffmann not only to discover Aix and of Paul Cezanne, and the remarkable artists of a studio and an atelier is, potent reminder of the elegiac mood the ‘other side’ of the Mediterranean trek of tens of thousands of people or has not been, really diminished. It so central to the development of the but to discover the intense research from all over the world making their is well established that Cezanne’s pastoral genre, to which Cezanne was and ferocious ambition which animated way to visit his atelier, and taking time primary reason for having the atelier especially sensitive, as the fugitive Cezanne’s life, captured in the pithy to view Mont Sainte-Victoire from built was a need for greater solitude. evanescence of his motifs, their formula ‘to re-do Poussin after nature’, the vantage points he was known His hermetical temperament was disappearing through the transparency nature which for him was his native to have used, which introduces the intensified by his physical condition in many of his watercolours indicates place, Aix and surroundings, that search for connection with the past exacerbated from diabetes, further one an evocation to the imagination as the inspired his deepest feelings. and the physical significance of place may mention his devout Catholicism, fleeting, disappearance of the world at to memory. A singular locus, even and what was effectively a compelling the day’s end when shepherds wearily There is in his attachment a solitary of a life passed, seems to hold onto need for distance from his immediate wend their way homewards with their devotion and a sense of a search for atmosphere and presence which are family. The need for a returning home bleating, sated flocks. Rather than the divine, to keep saying what is like a subtle aether. haunts his last great search through mourning the lost object, the object not sayable, to keep seeing what is the motif of the mountain. It is also as slipping away, and the evacuation not visible, until spoken, until seen. In a very traditional sense Cezanne has a search to find the inner emotional of solid forms, gives one a necessary There is much evidence to show how become the genius loci, the kind of state commensurate with the greatest assurance that ‘all things shall pass’. It is engaged he was with the study of tutelary figure who guards and keeps distance, which is given in the flat tragic wisdom and at the same time an optical phenomena. It involved radical the sense of place, protects the land, surface of the patchwork of colour affirmation of the beauty and fragility choices, and the kind of abrasion of gives grace and charm, wards against and through the optical illusion that of human life, as place, as history, as the tradition which ultimately is needed malign influences. creates a sense of depth. It is still constantly lingering and leaving. to renew it. Cezanne challenged the always inwardness, in the weave and tradition of viewing the object via the warp of surface in colour and the system of perspective, or a single view sense to which no measure could be point. In learning of his work, one must commensurate, it is the in of being in also learn about his perception and love, not of being in a contained space: the various forms of opposition his art it is the overpowering, thus the sublime, ineluctably followed. as experienced from the top of Mont Ventoux, on which Petrarch was the first to report (1336). So Cezanne finds the unlimited intimacy of his own emotions in the repetition of his motif and the distances which are the product of human desire as much as any metric; the longing for home is the last journey. 51

As a young man he had been advised There is also the impact of reading: to abandon his ‘provincialism’ and go Cezanne’s awareness of Berkeley’s to Paris; in old age he would delight theory of vision deserves much to think he ‘could astonish Paris with fuller study. The encounter of man an apple’. Humility and high resolve of and machine can be tracked, via ambition met constantly in his character. Leeuwenhoek, to Robert Hooke’s published microscopical plates, Recent research has focused on Micrographia (1665). William Molyneux Cezanne’s awareness of binocular visited Leeuwenhoek in Delft, to obtain vision and his interest in stereoscopy, some of his small microscopes and and there is still challenging scientific find out more about the manufacturing debate about such phenomena, the process. Molyneux’s work on vision in question remaining as to what metric is the Philosophical Transaction during relevant for visual sensation. the first years of the eighteenth century, inspired directly the thinking of Berkeley, in his reflections on vision and its properties, as revolutionary as Benjamin’s example of photography.

Pomme des Cezanne, C-print, 70 x 56 cm, 2017 Pommes et Miroir, C-print, 70 x 56 cm and 140 x 112 cm, 2018 55

Allowing for this it is still remarkable In an 1895 still life with curtain by to chart Cezanne’s insistence on Cezanne, one sees how the forms are simplification, seeing objects and the pressed and slightly squashed, like landscape, human figures in ‘geometric gravitational tidal forces, and that terms’, and how he achieves the illusion the ‘natural geometry’ of vision leads of depth by his way of working with to further conflicts and a harmony colours. Max Raphael, in his work which has to be thought of as a Von Monet zu Picasso (1913), was the ‘dynamic resolution’, where forces first to suggest that in the interplay are held in check, and have their of touch and sight the artist created suggestive maximum existence in a ‘quasi-corpus’, both real and irreal the surface. One need only compare simultaneously. One could point to his this with La table de la cuisine, 1888- fascination with stereoscopy, and the 90, where the placement of the use of binocular vision to lay before chair in the background shows a the viewer the clarity of 3D vision kind of holographic presence, with away from the ‘embranglement’ of all space folding and unfolding, half the senses that Berkeley mentions, natural half morphed, with the heavily geometric rigour and simplicity, subtle foreshortened pear on the napkin optical organisation that enhanced in the frontal view pivoted like the the way each eye can find a clear fulcrum of a sea saw, or the slide on focus and horizon for an image, which a child delights: the jouissance escape from linear perspective, all of gravity and the sympathy of things. creating a new possibility of seeing.

Cezanne’s studio, C-print, 70 x 56 cm, 2017 56

The spheres of oranges and their warm Paint is also a body, and light and texture are pitched and angled in colour can be shaped and twisted, such a way as to prevent what would moulded and felt as in the most haptic otherwise incite vertigo. Everything rendering of a clay sculpture. has singular irradiation within the In Cezanne one sees the radicalism of a composition whole, and there is conservative revolutionary: the tension something pulsating which gives the between the simplification in terms of sense of being alive, alive because of the geometrical, and the creation of the beautiful torsion in the harmonics. more complex forms from the study of Unlike abstract expressionists the colour and light. In his work sensation, push and pull is not based on colour touches of colour are modulated contrast or complementaries. From towards forms. In one of his last essays, both Courbet and Delacroix, Cezanne John Berger pointed again to the ‘black had learned of the emotion, thickness, box’ of Cezanne, where he sees much thinness and expressive energy of of the later emergence of the complex colour; it always creates difference, in achievements of the artist intent on hue, saturation etcetera, and the artist creating new optical truth and pictorial has for the most part no control over space. the subsequent ways of lighting or viewing, and thus must hold the density and weight of colour in the mind and the brush stroke simultaneously, to prevents skimming on the surface. The universal of light is always in tension with the singularity of the local.

Incidental Scene, C-print, 125 x 100 cm, 2015 58 59

The mythos of Cezanne developed in Cezanne in his watercolours could Having said all that, one notes the If it was an education and surprise to his life-time, as stubborn, eccentric, dissolve his motifs as much as any pathos of distance in Cezanne, who meet Cezanne. literally in the ‘flesh bohemian, provincial, belies the reality impressionist, but he found forces that could view the human figure in the of things’, one can also imagine of his intellectual commitments and resisted the new technical and analytic same way as a still life, just as a motif, Hoffmann’s delight, coming to the the scale of his research. His lifelong treatment of sensation and explored the occasion of colour sensation. artist directly for the first time, through wish to find a satisfying formula needs the structure of the motif, and in doing The jostling between sensation and the intricate traces of the atelier, and to be emphasised. It was Carl Einstein so acquired a strange primitivism joined structure remains essential to his finding his own earlier obsessions who saw in Cezanne a revolutionary to a complex pictorial technique. It was double style. For Cezanne colours were with the perceptual, objects in their because he was conservative. Indeed, a new attempt at classicism in changed modulated, not unlike the chromaticism seriatim variability, even when looking it is Einstein’s book Die Kunst des 20. historical conditions. The watercolours of musical composition where tones are like ornamental repetition. The pyramid Jahrhunderts that seals the tradition allowed the disappearance of the motif blended towards and away from each of skulls, the plate of apples and fruit, of modernity along its main axes, until the fundamental elements were other, creating a tightly woven tissue of the way the very surface of the apples and had the extraordinary fate of found. Einstein argues that before sounds, that become – and one has to acts like a crazy mirror, leads to an being used as a road map for the Cezanne no other French artist had mix metaphors – a becoming texture, hallucinative carousel as the eye find destruction of art in Germany during pushed painting towards primitivism, all of which is intricately inter related its constant lights and shadows literally the 1930s, and after the war being and the dualism one finds in him, and yet autonomous. Again motif and skating on the skin of the surface, used again to create a major exhibition between simple structure and pictorial modulation is as much musical as visual. highlights and shimmer, reflections of German art. The book opens sensitivity is indeed very complex. It and warm/cold tones, for all of this with a long analysis of Cezanne. is a dualism one finds in Poussin and the artist deployed from the 1880s to Corot; a phenomenon Einstein names almost the time of his death in 1906 a ‘double style’. One sees the tension palette of 19 colours, many of them the between the tectonic and an extreme recent product of chemical inventions. sensitivity to colour, His technical deployment of atoms of colour, which he called ‘la petite sensation’, was used to arrive at a classical composition – he sought a stability and holiness in the play of impressionist technique and construction. 61

The showing of the palette in a Irrespective of how materials in the self-portrait of Cezanne was of direct atelier have been replaced, or restored, interest to Hoffmann, as he had made the disposition of the space can be the palette and the thumb through the seen from earlier photographs, and we hold an object of photographic enquiry are fortunate to have an account of some years earlier. This interest in the a visit to the atelier in the latter days palette was further enhanced when he of Cezanne’s life. It is the place of his encountered at the Musée Granet, last final struggles, and in the report of December, Maurice Denis’s 1906 work the painters Rivière and Schnerb, who La Visite à Cezanne, dit aussi Monsieur visited him in 1905, and whose account Cezanne sur le motif. We see the artist was published a year after his death at work, pointing or gesturing with his in La Grande Revue of 25 December right hand towards the palette, in the 1907, we have a precious confirmation centre of the picture an easel laden with of the painter’s own self-understanding, weights to keep it stable, and in the expressed as they say in his melodic distance the mountain. Also visitors are provincial accent, and with the elliptic depicted, one behind a tree to the right and obscure utterance of a solitary with blue leaves, and on the easel a man for whom all concourse is a kind canvas with the motif clearly discernible. of interruption. They note his sayings It is a picture of a picture being made, on drawing, colour, composition, and and a pointing to the productive secrets jumble the observations together: his of the paint box and palette – the box horror of Beaux-Arts emphasis on is visible towards the top left corner. drawing with a kind of anatomical The artist Denis is also included, making exactness; correcting a bottle in one his preparatory sketch of the painting, of his watercolours with his finger nail, and the colour tones of the foreground which was defective in terms of its echo the slight, delicate flesh tones of vertical slant, and declaring: ‘Je suis un the mountain which juts up above the primitif...’. horizon line, and one contour of which is ‘touched’ by the edge of the canvas. The painting on the easel seems in its placement in the composition an ‘equivalence’ to the motif; the motif is here as much the act of painting as what is painted. All the figures in the work keep their hats on whilst conversing, looking, drawing, or expounding.

Palette, C-print, 100 x 80 cm, 2010 Installation view Apophenia as Metaphor, wood, MDF, acrylic paint, 238 x 100 x 100 cm, 2014 Inflection Point; Fabula, C-print, 100 x 80 cm, 2014 66

In a very real sense Hoffmann Constructivism was developed with availed of the atelier to work with its different directions but in its earliest, original purpose. He responded in most organised forms, emerging from similar fashion to the material of the discussion in Moscow in the early 1920s, Fondation Vasarely. Here he entered it rejected the ideological and religious a world that was already familiar to tendencies in Kandinsky’s teaching and him from Albers. It was also familiar opted for a manifesto of ‘realism’ in to him from the city of Tel Aviv itself, which a communist architecture and which only a few years before his first design would emerge. Moshe Ginsburg residence there, in 2004, had been would write the key intellectual declared a world heritage site, due manifesto, and there is a long and to its 4000 Bauhaus style buildings, resonant impact of these ideas to the which were effectively contemporary contemporary scene, for example in the with the expansion of actual building works of architects Hadid and Koolhaas. by Bauhaus teachers from the late 1920s in Weimar and Berlin. The life It can also be noted that the annual and work of Vasarely was also a search publication of the Flechtheim Gallery, for a visual language directly flowing Der Querschnitt, was carrying Léger’s from optical and colour research, and manifesto on machine art, and the as scholarship has shown has a direct issue of utility as a primary concern, link to both the Bauhaus and the as well as the highly abstract work of work of Kandinsky. The clash between Picabia in the stage decoration for non-political and refined functionality the ballet Relâche – at the same date A study of Josef Albers, colour photographs, 2013 would occur in all the various avatars (1923 and onwards) – he exhibited his of the early constructivist and ‘Optophone’; all works that are essential Bauhaus concerns. The importance to the development of spectacular of photographic work can be seen optical events. in Rodchenko and Moholy-Nagy. From the material archive of Victor Vasarely, colour photograph, 2018 From the material archive of Victor Vasarely, colour photograph, 2018 70

When Moholy-Nagy took over as a What can further be noted is that the teacher in the Bauhaus, the theory of development of Gestalt psychology a Neues Sehen was developed and was taking place in Berlin also in 1923, with Albers the direction of the school the year that Albers and Moholy-Nagy in its search for integration of design began their teaching, taking over the teaching was expanded. role of Itten, which marks the end of In terms of photography, and this the ‘Expressionist’ dominance. A key view was first advanced by Gisèle publication of Wertheimer’s in 1923 Freund, the most significant Bauhaus was ‘Untersuchungen zür Lehre von teacher was Moholy-Nagy. His influence der Gestalt’, known to the students as extended to painting, book binding, the ‘dot’ paper, as it studied abstract typography, all of which was on show patterns made of dots. at the Guggenheim Retrospective in 2016, which allowed one see the prolific extent and influence of his work. In the publication of Bauhausbücher no.8, one has the compact theoretical and illustrated practise of Moholy-Nagy, and there is also a generous inclusion of many contemporary photographers. It is a key work in the movement to using light as a new artistic material and creating a photography without a camera, which can be seen in the ‘photograms’, where light sensitive paper has objects placed on it and they leave an image. The key argument in his text is the need for photography to fully grasp the materiality of light and to explore this beyond the very range of human vision. It was also in this publication that the concept of the ‘kinematic’ was advanced.

From the material archive of Victor Vasarely, colour photograph, 2018 72

Vasarely had studied in what was a In his response to Vasarely, Hoffmann Bauhaus inspired private art school in makes two moves which are as startling Budapest, which in translation called and as unusual as one might expect. itself ‘The Workshop’. Much of his He has literally taken the ‘materials’ working life was dedicated to studying within the Vasarely archive and used the effect of light and pattern, them to create new works. At the supplying from his analysis of optical same time he has indexed the material illusion new objects which he made archive, in order to show how the available in large constructed works elements of Vasarely’s work were of various coloured tiles, and via other chosen and prepared. The work of the media. His 1930 work Zebra is often artist is remarkably ambitious, both taken as the source image for later aiding in the future restoration of the ‘op-art’. The subject of zebras was works, for which the material archive found in the Moholy-Nagy publication had been intended, and at the same and Vasarely would return several time creating a visual record of what times in his life to these fundamental he has unearthed from, in many cases, sources, which stretched all the way a kind of living archaeological site. He back to the earliest Constructivist has further explored the problem of work, including the work of artists Gestalt and the optical illusion in order such as Tatlin, Malevich, etc. to suggest other directions for work, and as with his Interventions show delivered sculptural works. He literally washed individual tiles by hand over several intense months of daily work, and set to photographing the colour papers, which photographs he then uses to create new colour fields and minimalist work which create the kind of modulation so crucial in Cezanne’s practise.

From the material archive of Victor Vasarely, colour photograph, 2018 75

The question that somehow lies hidden Hoffmann has supplied some remarks in all of this engagement is the wider on this, and on his series which are one of how the legacy of Vasarely seen in Aix for the first time. He has can achieve even those ambitions provided a document written like a he had not fully realised. Could the set of notes in the third person to Fondation act as a fulcrum point to explicate the main elements of this re-engage the study of fundamentals third part of his triptych in action, and of visual illusion, new discoveries in the summary of another response neurological science and environmental to Cezanne which came from his or ecological perception as advanced encounters of material on display at by James Gibson, could it also be the Museé Granet. I give the document as much workshop as museum and here with some editorial emendations: engage again in new production? One can easily imagine the Fondation as a research laboratory and studio site for students of architecture, who are increasingly interested in studies of the relation, for example, of colour in architecture. Could the Fondation expand its own presence by a simple spatial move, return itself from the space-tense hexagon and open back to the Mont Sainte-Victoire – with a viewing platform on its roof, or a zen garden in its surround, and a removal of the small hedge row which blocks the view to the mountain? Somehow between Mont Sainte -Victoire and Mont Ventoux, the disparate foundations and cultural historical sites can be the great open air ‘atelier’ of a renewal of research and innovation of pedagogic and academic life for artists which could create a new living environment for learning, the exciting developments of Château Lacoste would again point in such a direction.

Exhibition view Simulations et Illusions, Fondation Vasarely, 2018 77

‘An optional title for the show was daughter watches patiently while the Transposition of Transmission. other seduces her father. There are many opposing factors within this Oran Hoffmann: a series produced painting. Between the daughters, the in 2013 will be put on view for the limbs spread out as a spider’s body, first time – Hoffmann puts to use a the vase positioned on the table. Is typological approach to revisit a scene this the wife as a pillar watching the he manages to construct. Salty sand scene, the mother, the urn. Cezanne’s stone rocks, the sky, the spaghetti-like figuration is used to form concepts hanging of the electrical lines and the of representation, beyond the affixed orange red hazard balls form psychological. This is seen more often together the elements at play. He in these early Cezanne paintings. The cooperates the notion of the recurrence abduction as sometimes called the of those elements that are at his rape is an even more suggestive motif. disposal. There is an imperative to Struggling to be both mythological as position the balls in strategic locations. well as painterly practice. It is elevated With his back towards the mirror-like by being a study in itself. As often surface of the Dead Sea he moves works of art are and should be. between electrical poles to try and control the geometry. The relationship Hoffmann as an artist never related of points, a hanging mechanism where much to figuration but is drawn to the the point of view creates an almost art historical theme in a more abstract flat surface, built from the stones way. Configuring the landscape to his reaching the sky. Lines hold the balls own hand, he tries to observe objects hovering over the landscape as they in space and position them through the scratch the surface of the mountain view of the camera, designating the view that hold the biblical history meaning beyond their own appearance. and with that a possibility for the art historical reference to reappear. The crossing of borders, the connecting of lines, the photographic In Cezanne’s ‘Lot and his daughters’ view as organizational to rendition the dance of limbs is evident. comprehend the aesthetics.’ He shows them as if they originate from the same source of life. Connected beyond the physical act, inter-layered and contrasted only by the difference in skin tone of man and woman. One

Sur le motif: Loth et ses filles, C-print, 70 x 56 cm, 2013 Writers acknowledgements: Written by Patrick Healy My deepest thanks to Michèle Cohen Proofing by Gijs van Koningsveld and La Non-Maison, where I had a Photographs by Oran Hoffmann writer’s residence in the month of December 2017, and for encouragement Patrick Healy is a philosopher, writer and in writing this text; also, my thanks to senior lecturer at the Delft University of Technology, faculty of Architecture. He Oran Hoffmann, who was generous in lives in Amsterdam. giving of his time to discuss his work.

F.I.U. Amsterdam | 2018 Atelier de Cezanne Fondation Vasarely cezanne-en-provence.com

for information | https://oranhoffmann.com