Francisco Infante Arana showed how to stay upright
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The paradoxical geometry of the landscape
Francisco Infante Arana – the name of this Russian artist with Spanish roots has become a household name. He is called one of the pioneers of domestic postmodernism, kinetic art and land art. However, Infante’s work is wider than art history clichés, but his author’s method of embedding unexpected geometric “artifacts” into a natural landscape is always recognizable. Francisco recently turned 80 years old. Together with his wife Nonna Goryunova, who has been working with her husband for decades, he marked the date with a new exhibition at ROSIZO. It was called “Vertical Position”.
“For us, art was a way to maintain an upright position” – these words, laid out from mirror foil, open the exhibition of Francisco Infante Arana and his wife Nonna Goryunova in Petroverigsky Lane. Knowing the biography of the artist, it is easy to understand that this is not just a metaphor.
From a young age, Francisco saw the world in his own way and did what he liked, but this vision did not fit into the Soviet official format. He, like many non-conformists, worked from time to time as an illustration, but more often he was free-floating, for which he was accused of parasitism a couple of times (and they could have been imprisoned for this). Although it is difficult to find a more enthusiastic workaholic in art than Infante Arana. Francisco is a man of contrasts, like his work; on the one hand – an eccentric introvert, but with a very ebullient temperament.
His character is well illustrated by the legendary episode with the project of kinetic lighting, which the artist developed in 1968 for the workshop of Mikhail Posokhin, the chief architect of Moscow at that time. According to Infante Aran’s idea, the Kremlin towers and St. Basil’s Cathedral were to be illuminated to the rhythm of Bach’s fugue and sounded with electronic music. Francisco spoiled the revolutionary, first of its kind, kinetic lighting project himself when he saw that a dozen more people signed up for it (from the chief architect to the secretary of the party organization), he tangled the wires, and the layout did not turn on during viewing.
By that time, the Stroganov graduate already had serious experience in highly artistic kinetics. In 1962, having just entered the institute, he became a member of the art group “Movement”, founded by Lev Nusberg. The history of kinetic art in the USSR actually begins with its appearance. And in 1970, he himself organized a group of artist-engineers “Argo”. By the way, one of Infante-Aran’s kinetic works appeared in the film “Office Romance”: in the apartment of Yuri Samokhvalov, he boasts of him in front of his boss – “mymra”. In parallel with his kinetic projects, Infante-Arana created spatial installations in nature. He calls his “inclusions” in the natural landscape “artifacts”. It is them that he shows at the exhibition in ROSIZO.
Before us are views of the sea, mountains or sky, where unexpected geometry is built in, turning an ordinary landscape into a paradoxical one. Here, for example, a sharp rock against the background of the sea. And on it are mirror wavy lines, directed upwards from the horizon so that it seems that the sea continues in a solid stone and it becomes fluid like water. And it’s not a photo montage. The artist first drew a detailed sketch-storyboard with comments. Then I cut out wave lines from the foil. Then for several hours in a row, together with his wife, he glued them on a rock to take hundreds of shots and choose the best one from them. The first hall presents just sketches and documentation of the creation of “artifacts” – the method of the artist’s work. In the following, we are already studying the results – more than a hundred works created over half a century in different parts of the world.
Suprematist collages laid out in the snow. Multicolored lines rushing towards the sea like avant-garde rain. Winter bare bushes, the trunks of which are wrapped in foil so that they turn into signs: a circle, a square, a triangle. One of these episodes is called “Through Time”. It was established in 2002 in the Italian region of Liguria. Before us are stones or walls of ancient buildings that seem to pierce lines – yellow, purple, red. In natural or historical space, the artist highlights implicit connections. This cycle, which has not been shown for a long time, occupied the largest hall, becoming the main focus of the exhibition.
Here we travel through time, space and reality, discovering endless structures of geometric shapes around. Combining abstraction and minimalism with a real landscape, the artist discovers for himself and the viewer the phenomenon of infinity, which can be exposed not only in distant space, but also next to you. This feeling of the infinity of the world and the desire to tirelessly explore its “strings”, dissect with engineering precision, as the author admits, helped him “maintain an upright position” all his life.
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The paradoxical geometry of the landscape
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