Ada Vilhan
The Garden of Philosophers
The area of our brain that perceives and absorbs images has for some time been under constant abuse in a hypnotising world of glowing screens and quickly fading images that flash on and off in a split second. Typically, we receive retinal stimuli that are neither conscious nor fixed, yet they do not disappear without trace. Without content, they fill our consciousness with emptiness, like the processed junk products of the food industry, which are filling but not satiating, because they have no nutrients. Most of the images are captivating, but as empty forms they carry no symbolic or metaphorical value, so they do not penetrate the mind and quickly fade from memory.
One of the most important thinkers of our time, the South Korean Byung-Chul Han, publishing his works in German, attributes the development of burnout depression, which could be called an epidemic, to the negative impact of excessive, positive and not least visual stimuli on the personality in his work ‘The Burnout Society’. Interpreting the personality as a living organism, he describes the mental problems of the human society of the last century in terms of the organism – virus – immune response, while the present is an era of the struggle of the personality, defenceless against positive stimuli, which are not therefore detected as enemies.
Consequently, it is perhaps no coincidence that radical minimalism is playing an increasingly important role in contemporary artistic practice, where works of art disconnect from the conceptual- objective-formal world to offer an alternative to the rampant stimulus tsunami. The eye can contemplate them as objects of relaxation and the mind as objects of contemplation. Ada Vilhan’s paintings do not appear as the mediators of mimesis, of the spectacle, or even of cognitive content, but rather objects of soothing the senses, of quieting the mind.
The title of the exhibition refers to the large-scale sculptural composition by Nándor Wágner, a sculptor of Hungarian origin who works in Japan. The Garden of Philosophers, which stands on the side of Gellért Hill looking over the city as a „monument” to calm contemplation, quieting the senses and concentrating on the essential. The founding deities of religions contemplate the symbol of universal unity, a perfect sphere, in a meditative posture, accompanied by their cult heroes. It is no coincidence that Vilhan has chosen this work as the title of her exhibition, since the postmodern act of receiving art, as the artist herself acknowledges, is in many ways linked to traditional ways of experiencing transcendence.
Ada Vilhan’s paintings also take on the third dimension with their crumpled, cracked surfaces. Her physically heavy canvases go beyond the boundaries of the panel painting and move towards the art object. Mass, surface, colour, form, intention and chance are separate qualities, apparently independent of each other, but sometimes in dialogue, which develop on the surface; sometimes they are combined, form momentary associations and then separate again. The folds, reminiscent of the organic development of natural forms, convey a sensory experience of touch, punctuated by geometric intersections and traces of human intervention. At the same time, the reduced use of colour and the restrained painterly means push the compositions towards minimalism.
Her palette, which used to be full of colour, has recently migrated towards the aforementioned minimalist use of colour; black, red, yellow and white, and their tonal transitions, and sometimes monochrome compositions or compositions that vary between just two primary colours, have become dominant on the often human-sized canvases. Gestural paint traces document the act of encountering the surface. The visual evocation and experience of touch by the viewer makes the memory of contact with haptic surfaces truly sensual and expressive. Passionate, wild and often raw, this group of works evokes the sight of human skin, flesh or lava in the process of solidifying, or perhaps stone surfaces grooved by erosion. These feminine works juxtapose human instincts with the mind, the wildness and tranquillity of nature, creating almost tense compositions that seem to be artworks and natural formations at the same time.
Another group of her works, mentioned above, is much more austere, almost reminiscent of the eternal tranquillity of Japanese Shinto gardens or the simplicity of haiku. In this monochromatic world, the meeting of black and white is embodied in a vertical interruption on the flat surface of a layer of loose paint. The blurred white trails, which can also be interpreted as luminescence, evoke the association of a light-sensitive film strip or a formless ray of light splitting the darkness. At the junction of light and dark surfaces, geometric edges sometimes appear as a visual sign of order. The paintings, although using completely different means than Wágner’s sculptural compositions, are conceived on the border between the material and the immaterial, in their constant interaction and confrontation, and also as the projection of an inner struggle.
János Schneller
Budapest, 12 October 2022
Published in Új Művészet Issue 10, 2022