The energetic dreams of instinct and the instant CAPA in artistic historical heritage and its nihilistic models Patricio Alvarez Aragón Palma de Mallorca, 2017
The context of CAPA's formation dates back to the twentieth century, when in the summer of 1991, the Chilean artist Freddy Flores Knistoff exiled in Amsterdam from 1985 began to investigate the nature of pure automatism and its experimental possibilities together with the Dutch artist Rik Lina, who at the time participated with F.F. Knistoff himself in the International Movement of Phases founded by Édouard Jaguer in 1952. Phases represented the direct continuation of the French and international Surrealist Movement, grouping a number of authors in their collective expositions of well differentiated tendencies in order to achieve a principle of unification of the trends linked to the more traditional Surrealism and experimental that was grouped in the artists of the stream of lyrical abstraction. It is interesting to note that this term owes its name to Wassily Kandinsky's work and his contribution to the theory of affects applied to painting, to introduce rhythm, balance and composition to automatic work in his 1910 improvisations which in the eyes of André Breton represented the ideal of automatism. It may be recalled that W. Kandinsky was presented as a guest of honor to the Salon des Surindépendants in 1933.
Left to right: Yves Tanguy, Andre Breton, Gordon Onslow Ford, Roberto Matta, Esteban Frances, Anne Matta, Jacqueline Breton Lamba. Photo by Gertrude Stein at her country house in Belignin, 1939.
Unlike Phases, the theory and practice of CAPA since its foundation was interested in the pure research of automatism in its most materialistic slope to somehow disassociate from the primordial aesthetic idea of more traditional Surrealism, based on an imitative painting of academic premises and in some ways illusionist. Thus the epicenter of research, following a more scientific and experimental way than purely aesthetic, began to inquire about the pure specificity of color, stain and its own autonomy in the practice of automatic collective painting situating it as a purely formalism movement of collaboration, heir of the thinking of Asger Jorn (1914-1973) and the physical automatism that theorized in the critic, Discours aux pinggouins of 1948, where A. Jorn, explained the automatic process not only as a psychic procedure, but also reflects a vitalist attitude , Organic and materialistic in order to discredit the rigid metaphysical foundation to which the object was
subjected. Regarding this criticism, Andre Breton himself, years ago in a capitalist text, published in the avant-garde magazine Minotauro, Des tendances les plus récentes de la peinture surrealiste of 1939, criticized the mentality with which some of his painter friends practiced automatism by be too timid and not let the same automatic process be corrected often ... so we could see the advent of the nihilistic model of absolute automatism and the new automatic wave as the latest trend of surreal practice in order to preserve pure improvisation, the trident of this moment was embodied by Gordon Onslow-Ford, Esteban Francés and Roberto Matta.
From here perhaps the most interesting is how the practice of absolute automatism in the American and European continent was approached, on the one hand Europe lived the horrible human drama of World War II bringing with it what Michel Tapié inaugurated as Art Autre that responded to another reality, framed in a proposal full of drama to accredit the inner exile experienced by the artist of this era. Art autre represented, among other ideas, the loss of confidence in humanity, the exile of heroes, the seclusion in intimacy and emptiness to turn the most negative images of his time into emblems of survival, energy and triumph in the face of the new hostile world. Of this period the artists of the School of Paris of post-1945, called the tachistas like Jean Dubuffet, Pierre Soulages, Nicholas of Stael, Hans Hartung, Serge Poliakoff, Jean Fautrier... a lso highlighted the experimental an international group CoBrA, presided by Christian Dotremont, Karel Appel, Asger Jorn, Pierre Alechinsky, Eugène Brands, Constant, Theo Wolvecamp, Édouard Jaguer among others. In Spain, the group "avant-garde" of El Paso with Antonio Sauras at the head and solo work of the Catalan Antoni Tàpies. As for Italy the Nuclear Movement and the contribution of the practice of the modification in Enrico Baj are fundamental to understand the future of the history of absolute automatism. In this respect, another key text to understand the development of automatism in America, is the text that André Breton made for the American collector and patron Peggy Guggenheim in 1941, Genesis and artistic perspective of surrealism, which soon became the model to follow From the young generation of American painting to Clement Greenberg's art theory, his friendship with the legendary Jackson Pollock, the founding of Abstract Expressionism in 1955 and his development in the Post-painterly Abstraction on 1964 with the participation of artists Like Morris Louis, Motherwell, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Frank Stella, among others. Later on, the contributions of Robert Morris, Carl André, Donald Judd, among other members of Minimal Art, and the latest posminimal tendencies such as Process Art with the magnificent contribution of Louise Bourgeois and Claes Oldenburg will be of interest. Without eluding the great contribution of the theories of Concept Art and Josep Kosuth towards the late 1960s and early 1970s, who were largely heirs to the tireless pioneer of artistic practice on aesthetics, Marcel Duchamp. CAPA is presented in 1990 as the direct continuity of the experience of these artists and art theorists, being our main contribution, the practice of collective automatic painting practice that in the pilgrimage teaches us to share, to fade the ego and to seek the wild improvisation in works full of surprise and improvisation in order to perpetuate our own experiences and our own context. The members of CAPA in 2017 are Freddy Flores Knistoff, Jose Estevao, James Burns, Jorge J Herrara Fuentealba and Patricio Alvarez Aragón.