¿Ornamento = delito?
The exhibited painting by Bunga. Construcción pictórica #19r, 2016. Wood, cardboard, paint and pigment. 180 x 150 x 10 cm. Courtesy: Bombas Gens Centre d’Art.
Bombas Gens Centre d’Art +info
To describe the exhibition, curator and director Nuria Enguita Mayo writes:
“Since Leon Battista Alberti considered the ornamentum as an auxiliary or complementary element of neatness, of "innate" beauty, to the controversial article by Adolf Loos Ornament und Verbrechen (Ornament and crime) in which he links the presence of ornament to primitive stages of cultural evolution, a vision seems to have been imposed that underestimates the function of ornament as a formal and methodical element. This "anti-ornamental" thought, which proposes a radical distinction between art and decoration, the material and the sensual, the spiritual and the rational, is expressed very clearly in the first writings on abstraction and in the formalist theories of the 20th century, which linked to a certain idea of "purity" and the thesis of "art for art's sake" proposed to rescue the specificity of the artistic, detaching it from any contextual reference and from any heteronomous function. But the de-ornamentation proposal has its historical and present answer. There are uses and conceptions of ornament that do not consider it contingent, but rather an intrinsic value, a structural and essential condition of art, neither subsidiary nor superfluous.”
Curator: Nuria Enguita Mayo
2017. Valencia, Spain.
