The last book by the philosopher Norbert Bilbeny (Barcelona, ??1953), professor of Ethics at the UB, is an instructive essay on painting. Having written from the pictorial practice of the author himself, his optics is that of contemporary art. His starting thesis is that we are animals of realities: we want to always be connected with everything; we seek to touch the world. That is why the artist does not create, recreates reality; figurative art recreates the visible world; the abstract, invisible realities. Art seeks to intensify our perception of the world.
With a clarifying and agile style, structured in brief and dynamic chapters, it forms a good introduction, for non-aesthete readers, to the reasons and meaning of abstract painting. The lay viewer of non-naturalist paintings will understand, reading this book, why the works that he does not understand are considered works of art.
He makes an original distinction between understanding and comprehending, or between figuration and avant-garde, exposing the reasons why, between the year 1911 of Kandinsky and the year 1917 of Marcel Duchamp’s famous urinal, naturalism, mired in its blind alley, collapsed and painting was no longer able to continue reproducing the world of nature. It explains why painting had no choice but to reproduce another world (that of the artist himself and his technique) different from the natural one; art turned in on itself. The book makes it clear to non-expert viewers where the interest lies in the fact that the subject of abstract art is art itself and the artist. Philosophically speaking, it implies the preeminence of the spirit over nature, which implies displacing the content (matter) in favor of the form (spirit).
Bilbeny exposes, with dozens of examples, why abstract art is a production rather than a reproduction, controversially denying that figurative painting is more concrete than abstract painting, since the latter is abstracted from meaning and interpretation, that is, precisely, from the vague polysemy. Not wanting to be interpreted and not seeking to signify, abstract painting shows only signs, which are always, by their own creation, concrete signs. Contrary to what is normally believed, the book explains, with many examples, that the figurative cannot be specified because it always wants to represent ideas that go beyond what is shown. He criticizes the popular idea that abstract paintings are easier and less ingenious to create, since by not seeking to mimic or imitate sensitive things, they must invent separate contents (abstracted) from the perceptible. Which makes creation extremely difficult and requires a large dose of imagination.
The argumentative force of the book resides in the erudition with which it brings up dozens of examples to denounce that “provocation is not always art (…) Current art, with museum halls converted into warehouses of curiosities or showcases of surprises, includes a handful of mediocre artists”. The author demands that, although current painting does not seek beauty, in order to continue being art it cannot give up arousing aesthetic pleasure, since without moving and pleasing there is no spectator; and without the pleasure the artist takes in the object of his imagination, there would be no paintings.
Norbert Bilbeny Tocar el mundo Elba 136 pages 20 euros
