Véronique Rizzo

Véronique Rizzo lives and works in Marseille (FR)

Splitscreen

“I already said it was reasonable to speak of the primitiveness of the situation as an opposition to what is actually there.
This primitiveness is what is called the domain of the soul rather han the mind.”’
RICHARD WRIGHT, Hello B No Clothes I Love You, 1996

“Knees tell geometry: to kneel is to discover the right angle. Head thinking: geometry comes from body’s reflex being cast in my mind.`
LYGIA CLARK, Letter to Hello OIIILGA, Paass, July 6”, 1974.


Aesthetic utopias from the last century could be reduced and organized into two successive waves: modernist utopias and psychedelic utopia. They especially share the aim to reform social and individual space by the art way and to get a completely new idea of the world, cleared of its figurative scories and representational preconceptions: abstraction as a new vehicle for new harmony between men and the world.

“For the New Plastic too, nature is that great manifestation through which our deepest being is revealed and assume his concrete appearence. (…) The more we feel harmony in a clear way, the more we could plastically express the relation there is between colour and sound in a clear way 3 “.
“Psychedelic equals mind-opening consciousness. Psychedelic mens ecstatic, which is to stand outside our normal patterns.It means going out of your mind, your habitual world of contingencies, space-time co-ordinates. And the key issue: Anything that exists outside exists there inside.4 “

Global equivalence in plans: to feel a pure awareness of the world again and develop practical means to express it.
“The search for a way to express hugeness led to the search for the greatest tension: straight line, because all curves solve themselves into a straight line, and
there is no space left for a curve 5”.
“Psychedelic art is generally kinetic, vibrant and animated by an incessant bubbling 6”.
Characteristic break with constructed modernist esthetic can only partly be explained by the importance of drugs in psychedelic experience. It was also a beatnik and hippie attack against some modern heritage. Bringing a collective utopia which turned down individualism inherent in bureaucratico-domestic society from the the fifties and sixties (just as modernism offering a new collective pattern, at odds with conservatism in liberal bourgeois society at the begining of twentieth century), what they most disparaged was oppressive integrated rationlism, legacy of some notion/deviance of modernism. Finally, psychedelic movement as a whole, at least from the sixties, is anti-elitist, mass movement, including in its sthetic project heaps of motives coming from pop culture, streets, pop music, fashions, mystic philosophical beliefs, hallucinogenic drugs, references to a scattered visual culture (from ornamental leanings in Art Nouveau to oriental serial prints), etc. Dilution in mainstream and spreading to mainstream in a sort of double movement stating terms of postmodernity and reassessed autonomy of creation. Faced with modernist project purity - as it’s a staunch purity -, psychedelic movement appears as a critical and sthetical ideology distorted because of its absolutely liberated relations to popular culture; it’s an hybrid.

WHILE psychedelic thinking was coming to light, concrete artists split off;
Helio Oiticia and Lygia Clark influenced it in Argentina and Brasil,
and Rio, and later, social plastic expérimentations from the Groupe de Recherches d’Art Visuel let to the same in France.
Rationalist aesthetics of concrete art is made of two drifts n Sào Paulo and Rio, intellectual “paulista” drift, and intuitive “carioca” one, which Lygia Clark is part of. ‘You know, if I’m working, Mondrian, its to fulfil myself, in the higher aesthetic and religious sense. That is not to make surfaces. I make exhibitions to pass on this stopping moment in cosmological dynamics that the artist can capture 7”.
Lygia Clark and some of these “neo-concrete” artists don’t turn down the whole thinking of Mondrian; they wish they would give it a cosmic depth, what would be light years away from De Stilj rational project (forgetting ambiguities inherent in neo-plasticism guru quest for absolute truth). lo Lygia Clark, abstraction makes two different ways: “When the artist cut out L a figure and entered abstraction, two stances emerged, as ever, a romantic one and t a constructed one. Different ways but both are valid because altogether necessary t to expression 8 “. It seems that Lygia Clark favours romantic alternative, defining her connection with the world as “pantheistic 9” This alternative echoes psychedelic idea of creation, which is passed through by the desire to be deep into the sublime and to communicate with the universe, by the myth of a bygone origin and (intellectual, social) break, required to merge again into it.
This quest for absolute experience must be seen as the preliminaries to a reassessment of reality, to a wish of effective change in social relationship.There is no counterculture which would not act “as opposition to what is actually there10 “. Lygia Clark developped her art in a way of waving of her authorship condition, and only set “situations in which the other goes across experiences, t maybe more psychological or sensory than cesthetical.11”
After 1968 in Paris, the GRAV lays down the principles for a percept tuai abstraction and for effectiveness of new relational models between work and viewers “At the same time as art has moved from the figurative to the I real,from fiction to the event, it has shed its bis rdenstone metaphysical mantle. From now on it is part of real life(…) It is, above all, an activating factor of our senses. t I am making an art form of primary sensations 12”. Out goes cosmic metaphysical feature of art, the sublime: the GRAV is only based on the effects transmittable to the optic nerve by kinetic means. Psychotropic effects t without using psychotropic drugs Maybe would it tell us why GRAV time was so brief. “Op Art, more than any other artistic movement,finally seems to have obeyed to the letter this principle of planned obsolescence.”
No doubt we also might take its final integration into the liberal dominant group and in social planning into account, a way of fulfilling the plan t to merge with reality (though it would not be so important to perpetuate t the union). Elsewhere in the seventies, Lygia Clark introduces therapeutic transactional objects and situations.


IN 2005, Véronique Rizzo appropriates juxtaposition and overlapping of coloured surfaces from Surfaces Modulées (1955) painted by Lygia Clark in her neo-concrete period.

Carrying out a kind of analytic shortcut in the career of the artist, the revival litteraly operates as the original composition structure was unpicked: laid out bright coloured mats made of Leatherette. This synthesis between abstract geometrical first steps of Lygia Clark and her experimental research years on the body topic obviously asks questions about the use which can be done with abstraction, the possible appropriation by the spectator’s body. But above all, it is the very potential of this use, at a time when works are relationnaly standardized and when abstraction motives are integrated by design and interior decorating, which is claimed to be undecided. Snug and lovely, soft and handy, fitting into the espace (just as it could be said of a fitted kitchen), Véronique Rizzo’s mats ask how to offer some radical physical and relational experience now. Does abstraction truly become attenuated in a suitably designed scene for our consumerist movements to stay flexible?

Asking these questions now academic that prompt in a more or less cynical or nostalgic way, the current artistic discourse about abstraction, modernism and avant-garde legacy, Véronique Rizzo brings the original strategies and answers.

Clearly, if we had to take the distinction drawn by Lygia Clark up again, the works of Véronique Rizzo would rather stand on the romantic side of geometrical abstraction. But this romantic-intuitive approach that could be seen just as a disorientated or even outdated vain wish is compensated and optimized by an adapted treatment of contemporary popular culture. Videos by Véronique Rizzo flirt with V-jaying and Acid House imagery as much as with GRAV optical sets and the Joshua White Light Show that was used as a multicoloured background by sixties bands”. She uses 3D and digital images making softwares as a basic palette to inspire herself, and precisely exploit their famous elementary effects, their tropes. Borrowing the titles of her works to Soft Machine LPs, to mantras or digital counterculture slogans, she includes her work within the framework of this contemporary culture pixel-named, in a postmodern intermingling.

M O R E than to modernist utopia or constructed abstraction, her works
fasten onto perceptual abstraction. Vibrant, flashy, engulfing, the videos and wallpaintings by Véronique Rizzo develop an excessive aesthetic of visual effect and appeal. It is an exponential dynamic we are faced with, a Pandora method, that not only produces the perceptive effect of perpetual motion. No image prevails over another, nor no motive, there is no organized priority, no selection, no referential designation, no hierarchy. Doing such things, she asserts two both contradictory and combinatory directions: one, critical, going for an atmospheris apprehension of abstraction, not even decorative nor ornamental, but only ambient, and another, idealistic, going for an intuitive apprehension of abstraction, relieved from its analytic inflexibility, reinvested by a negotiation power with physical feature of the spectator. In a more symbolic way, this unestablishment of a hierarchy is about to set down the possibility of a sense liberation, following up the psychedelic clue, and to renew many of the disorientation strategies induced by drug abuse or kinetic process on the optic nerve.
Well, the link between these two apprehensions leads to a paranoid review with regard to the takeover of forms from abstraction by liberal imagery, and this review involves not a rehabilitation attempt of these forms corrupted by post industrial society, but a re-exploitation attempt, in both spatial and economical senses. Because it is well-known today that even the most intangible works cannot escape merchandisation -neither cannot objets d’art-, private and sensory space is still the best place to build a new world set back from economical oppression and prevailing ideologies.

IN1992, as the Baggy period 15 was in full swing, scottish band Primal Scream wishes, introducing its hit Loaded: “What is it exactly that you want to do? We want to be free. And we want to get loaded. And we want to have a good time 16”. Typical psychedelic slogan, although cut from the revolutionary ambition it could have retained. Cooked up by an indie-pop orthodox-run band, Loaded suitably merges pop with influences from House tidal wave in England in the end of the eighties called the Second Summer Of Love. The Second Summer Of Love repeats the motives of “psychedelic time”: drugs, music, and their collective experience on an organized counterculture background ( let’s remember the Hacienda, the famous Manchester club): hedonism for protest arm.

Just as the hippie movement, the Second Summer Of Love was branded as a turning in on community movement of the young towards values that appear less positive and reforming than used to cover up and escape from reality… This outlook is obviously conservative, designed to run down the signifiance of a fringe contestation. But the essential difference with the hippie movement is in the roots. While this one was appealing to a return to some original lifestyle, to the primitive qualities of a mythic paradise lost (this is really an american view, so it is no wonder that the hippie movement arose in the New World), the Second Summer Of Love, with this name borrowed from 1967’s Summer Of Love in San Francisco, was ideologically connected to an ideal era that went back hardly thirty years… Postmodern hedonism? There is an hedonist discourse in Véronique Rizzo’s work, between the treatment of an historical imagery and the immersion of the spectator in an undeniable sense present parallel spheres.


1. This text describes in a subjective way LSD effects, in My Head Is On Fire But My Heart Is Full Of Love, eponymous catalogue of the exhibition at Charlottenburg Exhibition Hall, Copenhague, ed. Modern institute, 2002, p.48 (first ed. by Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, 1996).
2. Lygia Clark- Hello Oiticica : Cartas, 1964-1974, ed. UFRJ, Rio de Janeiro, 1996, in Cat. Lygin Clark, RMN, 1998, p.288
3. Piet Mondrian, “Dialogue an the New Plastic”, in Art in Theory 1900-2000, 2002, p.286 (first ed. in De Stilj review, feb- march 1919)
4. Michael Hollingshead, The Man Who Turned On The World, London, blond & Briggs, 1973. Quoted by Andrew Wilson in “Spontaneous Underground, An Introduction to London Psychedelic Scenes, 1965-1968”, in Summer Of Love, Psychedelic Art, Social Crisis and Counterculture in the 1960’s, ed. Christoph Grunenberg and Jonathan Harris, Liverpool University Press and Tate Liverpool, 2005, p.63.
5, Piet Mondrian, op.cit., p.78.
6. Barry N. Schwartz, Psychedelic Art, 1968, quoted by Mathieu Poirier in “Hyper-Optical and Kinetic Stimulation, Happenings and Films in France”, in Summer of Love, op.cit., p.282.
7. Lygia Clark, A Letter to Mondrian, May 1959, in Catalogue Lygia Clark, op cit., p114, translated from French.
8. Lygia Clark, 1960, in Catalogue Lygia Clark, op,cit. , p.139.
9, Lygia Clark “Nature nourished and balanced me almost in a pantheistic way”, Letter to Mondrian, op cit.
10. Richard Wright, op.cit.
11. Ferreira Gullar, “La Trajectoire de Lygia Clark”, in Cat. Lygia Clark, op.cit., p.67
12. CarIos Cruz-Diez, quoted by Matthieu Poirier in Summer Of love , op cit., p.67
13. Vincent Pecoil, “Op Stars”, Art Monthly n°270, October 2003, p.9.
14. Cf. the conversation between Edwin Pouncey and Joshua White in Summer Of Love, op.cit., pp.164-178.
15. The Baggy period refers to the music produced by the Happy Mondays, the Stone Roses, etc, and from time to time, by Primal Scream… This period is so called because ol the baggy pants worn by these bands, inspired by House dance floors fashion.
16. Primal Scream, Screamadelica LP, Creation records, 1992

Text by Lili Reynaud-Dewar in Monographie - Véronique Rizzo, Paris: ed. 02, 2006
Translation: Aude Launay, Enzo Thalizari

Véronique Rizzo’ work in on display during the exhibitions Christophe Berdaguer & Marie Péjus, Madeleine Berkhemer, Ingrid Mourreau, Géraldine Pastor-Lloret, Véronique Rizzo, Laurent Terras, 1998; Authentiques Résidents, 2001 and Trabendo, 2003