Vera Molnar: Pioneer

Vera Molnar

Source: Google images

Vera Molnar, a Hungarian born French artist, began her life-long passion of creating art at a very early age (philipgalantar.com)  She began sketching landscapes of her uncle's cabin in the mountains at age twelve and is accredited with developing "systematic methods of creating art" (philipgalanter.com).  As noted on philipgalanter.com, she used only five colors to repeatedly draw this scene until she grew unhappy with her pieces, then she would switch colors adjacent to each other.  As her career progressed, she became a Professor of Art History and Aesthetics at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest (philipgalanter.com).  As the article by Paul Hertz expresses, she was said to have 'programmed' her art before ever using what she referred to as the 'Machine Imaginaire" (philipgalanter.com).  A portion of her artwork is centered around repetitive shapes with a diverse set of variations for each, continuing her style of systematic "trial and error" with different forms of a singular image.  She continues to make art from her residence in Paris (philipgalanter.com).

http://www.dam.org/dox/2456.6Pkud.H.1.De.php

The above image is a part of her "Hypertransformation" series.  I took a liking to her artwork, after reading that her methods were algorithmic and systematic.  I wondered what type of art she created and these were the types of images I found.  At first, the two-dimensional image is just that: flat; however, after a second or so, I found my eyes interpreting the image as having a large amount of increasingly concentrated depth.  This particular image and style reminds me of a scene from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, starring Gene Wilder, in which the visitors to Wonka's factory enter a hallway that is continually getting smaller, but looks large from afar.  My intrigue in this art type is seated in its simplicity, yet complex nature.  The very systematic repetition of squares that decrease in size is hypnotic and is similar to hypnosis devices like the cliche spiraling coin:

Google Images

http://digitalartmuseum.org/gallery/image/8845

Molnar, 1990

The spacing between the squares adds the third dimension of perception to the piece and transforms the image significantly.  A similar image (below), from the series "Lettres de ma Mere," uses a different method of repetition while retaining a systematic chaos quality.  This piece reminded me of the style used by the author Johnathan Safran Foer in his novel "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close."  I never read this book, but was shown a page out of it by my sister, where the printing of a series of pages had been repeated to create an increasingly dense block of text:

Google Images

Overall, I found Molnar's works to be very interesting and simple.  There are just a lot of variations which would make it seem like her art is not very hard to imitate.  I feel that her art lacks in the complex nature that makes modern art visually challenging, but her skill in creating more complex images only using repetition or scaling, similar to the way a computer works, is noticeable and enticing.    I was drawn more to her pieces that involved bright colors, of mainly yellows, reds, and blues.  There are many examples of how similar ideas to her's have been applied to a variety of mediums and methods, though this seems to be commonplace among her style of taking a stock image and performing a multitude of transformations on it until distortion is limiting creativity.