Entity

Entity - By Cyril Schwastiak

An entity literally designates ‘something which exists’ and makes us question the very nature of what constitutes art, the quiddity of a specific work. In a century where the ‘inaccessibility’ of a work seems to have become the rule, can one still find the emotional pull of a Winged Victory of Samothrace or The Persistence of Memory in contemporary art?

A memento mori seems to prefigure a suspension in time when it comes to art, a fantastic parenthesis which severs the creation from the world it belongs to, that it is borne from. So for certain individuals, art died along with the emergence of contemporary art. It disappeared into the meanders of surrealism, Pop art, Fluxus or even postmodernism, and in reaching this threshold, art seems to have forgotten its very object.

Art has conceptualised itself, spiritualised itself as it ceased to represent the divine, leaving its admirers and amateurs by the wayside, all those, profane, who do not possess the codes necessary for understanding of the beauty of a work. So some travel back in time, lost in the contemplation of Friedrich’s Stages of Life or even Homer’s Breezing Up, as if modern art were in fact Bruno Catalano’s Voyager, this representation of a void lying at the heart of Mankind, a forgotten land between a urinal[1] and a soap box[2].

Nowadays, contemporary art seems to have overtaken its own self, as if lost in the era following the Ready-made, or maybe the Mother by Louise Bourgeois. It seems to have lost its filiation, entangled in a web whose threads of creative freedom have made it a prisoner, incapable of fostering  a connection between humans which could breed anything other than a misunderstanding.

Society seems to advance without art, negating it, detesting it, incapable of understanding a work outside of the art critic’s gaze, of those whose expertise determines beauty or ugliness. In this sense, though it swears it is emancipated from in the name of the artistic eccentricity, of disruptive practices, is art not following in the footsteps of a civilisation made up of experts, of standardisation, of appropriateness?

And here, within these walls, constructed as the incoherence of art was coalescing, we see entities invested with a new aura, identities that surpass the work itself,  identities encompassing those of these reputed or obscure artists, those legitimised or truly unknown, who paint, sculpt, perform and combine the arts, so that we may once again open our eyes onto beauty, emotion and emancipation.

Hybrid’s Crib has invited artists from all walks of life to the Est gallery space, to come and present their works, embedding this location in the hic and nunc of their creation, in a momentary atemporality, freezing time despite its interminable passing, something only the identity of an entity may achieve.

An entity implies a unity of space and time, Platonical beauty made up of circles and patterns, of figures and shapes, in a chromatic mingling invoking ecstatic contemplation. It is an intuition, a vague idea of existence or the existing, which finds its essence in the substance of what is real.

An entity is what connects this tangible, palpable world to its allegorical or even chimeric representation. It is a phantasmagorical abstraction, the individualising perception of an artist laying their identity upon the altar of art for the benefit of the general public. Itis a part of themselves, maybe their very idiosyncrasy.

[1] Fountain, Marcel Duchamp, 1917.

[2] Andy Warhol, Brillo Soap Box, 1964.