BES: Conflict, Polarization and Noise Paintings: the architecture of color
Boy & Erik Stappaerts (BES) makes Conflict, Polarization Paintings and Noise Paintings without the classic act of painting. Why can’t a painter be someone who wants to become aware of the maximum potential of colors that can best “paint” themselves? The painter then plays the role of “color developer”, who helps color – whether it is a digital creation on the computer or a material mixture of dyes – to best approach its optimum “fullness”. The supernatural color saturation that characterizes the Paintings corresponds to the digital and industrial components of BES ‘precision work: computer prints based on digitally fine-tuned colors and all-covering body paint. The color print has the dual function of autonomous artwork and preliminary study of the pre-milled aluminum plate support that craftsmen patinate with high-tech sprayers to varnished lacquer painting, hard and glass like a mirror, purely without reading direction, relief or touch.
The composed rhythms of dissonant optical color effects are a reflection of the artist’s emotional “climate”. They form a (color image) language of affect that drags the viewer into a personal experience theater in which each color group acts as an “ethnic and ideological” entity with a range of “personalities” and “characters.” After all, within a color group there is a power structure between militant leaders and followers that is determined by variegated gradations within a color group. The turning points at which one color group touches another are the referees in the process of integration and conflict. In that sense, Conflict Paintings also depict social models that significantly deepen the meaning of the essentially abstract color studies.
If Conflict Paintings generate a sharp effect of tragic drama, the catharsis, then Polarization Paintings, BES’s second group of varnished lacquer paintings, appear to be a much more sensitive exercise of thinking and balancing. The gradually expanding horizontality exudes coordination and balance. The screaming conflict gives way to visual color fields that ebb in waves and thus represent polarization, whereby the gap between classes gradually increases, until the midfield fades completely and becomes a zero point. Polarization Paintings cause a more perceptually subtle awareness of areas of tension, but, like Conflict Paintings, look for new order.
Frontal confrontations with Paintings are more radical than the emotional surprise caused by the purest color fields of the historic Colorfield Painters. The boundaries between color zones in the Paintings are in any case even harder than the sharpest transitions between Hard Edge color fields and the isolated color areas are more in your face than the clearest computer-controlled color configurations of the Dutch artist Peter Struycken. Although there are points of contact somewhere in the systematic color studies of both artists. Within the virtual computer world they play homemade “color keyboard” in various virtuoso ways.
Digitally archived in the Pentagronium (or Collections and Databases), the Paintings but also BES ’millitimized structural drawings – which are built up in layers of lime paper suggesting monuments or city-bound crop circles – can be physically reproduced in a certain external form. For example, they can also become a sculpture in space. In this 3D phase the typical colorite and thinking about communities can take the form of a “boundary post that muses about its status” or a “battery”. Can one idea or one political ideology live under one family roof?
The art of BES is able to thoroughly accentuate and recalibrate an environment and an individual’s life. The constructivists mentioned bringing art into life, not as an empty slogan, but with the mission to achieve a revolutionary society. The avant-garde is timeless and BES ’Painting refers to the avant-garde painting by forming the avant-garde of contemporary painting.
BES Institute and Pentagronium (or Collections and Databases)
The activist climate of the avant-garde lives in the BES Institute. In the ideal world, the institute is a glass leisure and lifestyle center, built on the edge of an abyss in a pristine region. The Mother Machine, ideally a self-sustaining network of rotating rotors, provides the necessary energy autonomously. Visitors here escape the outside world and end up in a new inner world. He / she / x is invited to participate in a personal and collective enrichment project. The activation of persons takes place via one of the basic structures of the BES Institute, in particular the conceptual drawing program Objects and Backgrounds that is housed in a green, pentagonal grass bunker named Pentagronium.
Objects and Backgrounds. The disconnection of the “object” and its “background” or “context” consists of two key aspects. On the one hand it is artistic in nature. The impact of BES on aesthetic or identical experience must become irrelevant. BES ’artistic output: boundary posts, batteries, Conflict, Polarization, Noise Paintings and other sculptures and urban monuments, are vectorally converted in the digital drawing program and made ‘ready for use’ for the visitor or web surfer. Art undergoes a process of democratization by acting as a virtual background. BES ’art provides basic structures, call it separate parts that become‘ commodities ’. From that moment there is no more artistic control, only social interaction.
The visitor chooses one or more backgrounds or “contexts” that he / she / x can adjust in color and transparency. This switch from visitor to participant is the second, “sociological” disconnection of object and context. The object undergoes an important subjectification and becomes de facto a method for conducting self-research and development. The chosen background becomes the basis of a “worksheet” on a computer. This sheet is linked to a user interface of the drawing program, consisting of interactive checklist templates. The participant thereby labels himself – pick and choose – and clicks according to his state of mind or emotional household of the moment for example on basic categories such as ‘Dramatic’, ‘Romantic’ or ‘Relative’ and within the group ‘conceptual spaces’ for example clicks on subcategories such as ‘Space of breath for lovers’,’ The puker ‘,’ The Panic Zone ‘,’ Embracement ‘,’ Hip-hop dancefloor ‘and build on this on the basis of offered lemmata such as’ labyrinths’,’ machines’, ‘buildings ‘,’ vaginas-dicks’, ‘circles’ or’ ovals’ etc.
The user creates his own psychological profile using visual graphics, via word and image. Via a mail program he / she / x can transmit the always temporary results – after all, the creation of “self-images” and function as a diary – to themselves and / or the “Pentagronium community”, the diversified community of visual user profiles. In that sense, the community is a social medium with an inherent socio-critical message. After all, the value of the collective lies in the furry nature of the company.
The drawing program is intended as an “open platform”, an interactive database to which everyone can add elements. The database itself thus becomes an artistic, multi-identical and common medium that connects people. Personal expression is not spoken, but seen.
Color Cabinet
BES ’Color Cabinet – Research and Development has the appeal of a kaleidoscope, despite the clear principle of ordering that determines the composition of colors. The cube, a geometric structure in three dimensions, consists of rhythmically archived color plates of aluminum. It is a spatial color scheme in seven floors and four planes with … color plates that relate to each other at the same distance and in the same angle.
As an aesthetic object, this “color cabinet” sensitizes any space. After all, she is too “clean” to look past. It is a matter of looking into it and through it or walking around at pace to be kaleidoscopically stimulated and to play the game of colors.
As a conceptual work of art, the cupboard is a study object that formulates an answer to a number of centuries of color theory and logic. Red, blue (and yellow) are the parameters for the study of color as a whole. This applied to all influential, “modern” color theories of Eugène Chevreul, Johannes Itten or Ogden Rood, but also to Mondrian’s paintings. Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue? In nature there is only one dominant color: green.
Where is it green? In the past, green was the most difficult pigment to produce because it easily “fell” into a dull, brownish hue with as much appeal as a rotten potato. Mixtures of yellow and blue make a poor version of green de facto. Only with the introduction of synthetic green pigments did the color become a fruitful introduction to the arts. BES ’Color Cabinet pays homage to the color family‘ green ’, with all its hues and variations. The artistic intervention to bring out “green” in the cubic color spectrum and to pull it away from “brown” creates a new color logic.
The innovation lies in the paradigm shift. “Green” also becomes dominant because BES lets its hues influence a whole host of different color families. Apple blue sea green, for example, is an important influencer and creates clash zones between yellow and green, and blue and red. Apple blue sea green embodies transitions and recreates identities in a society of color hues in which conflict and harmony alternate.
Even though the non-color light and dark rhythm the four faces of the cube in an S-structure, it is the colors that shape and compose a language of their own. BES’s color cabinet lends abstract painting with green a shifted basis, with possibilities that tend towards endlessness.