Francis Picabia

One of the coolest and most stunning exhibitions I´ve seen was the Francis Picabia exhibition at the Kunsthalle Krems in 2012 – Krems and the Wachau region is by the way considered one of the most beautiful places in the world, it is included in the UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites and the train ride from Vienna to Krems is something I find extremely pacifying. – Picabia was one of the greatest talents among the painters of the 20th century, and he had one of the most unusual visions. A permanent experimenter and close friend of Marcel Duchamp, he emerged from impressionism and would subesequently touch upon many streams and possibilities of art/painting, he had an influence on Dada, ironically hailed the machine age, he painted a beautiful series of portraits of Espanolas, in the Transparences he painted in multiple layers, he was a painter of nudes as well as of portraits that are, well: proto-pop art? Or just unintentional, immediate art?, and finally he would turn into abstractionism.  What he did is not something you would expect. Picabia´s paintings are all immediate and well-formulated, nevertheless you are always under the impression that they are on the run and there´s irony to them: Product of a very quick and malleable mind. It is difficult to put into words what makes their metaphysical quality (i.e. showing the possibility of another world in the world that you immediately present), when I look at Picabia´s paintings, they suddenly collapse into themselves, into a (pseudo) singularity and from there form anew, probably into something completely different, but no less (meta) ironic, a hasty child laughter accompanying the process. – You´re under the impression that Picabia created no great masterpieces although many pieces like Femme à la cigarette, La Femme au monocle, Mardi Gras (Le Baiser), Femme nue, Ganga, L´élégante, Petit soleil, Cynisme et indécence, Espanola à la guitare, Nu devant un paysage et al. are very cool, and in fact it is the entire oeuvre that galvanises. Picabia´s oeuvre is extremely vibrating in being such an expression of – art … and the spirit of art – I reiterate, I am very happy that I have seen this grandiose exhibition! – Some (like Marcel´s brother Gaston) said that the permanently experimental nature of Picabia´s oeuvre is because – while being a major talent – Picabia would, in reality, lack depth and personality, but as I state once in a while, escaping the boundaries and bondages of personality (and depth) is not necessarily a bad thing as it makes you more flexible and fluid and a better human being (it is true however, that, upon reflection, Picabia´s Transparences, alluding to the possibility of experiencing the multilayeredness of the world, do not acually reveal metaphysical depth or a deep structure of the world, rather an indifferent togetherness if not juxtaposition (also his writings are, well, a juxtaposition of superficiality and depth (which is, however, not uncommon among artists (and one of his aphorism says: „What widens our personality is good, what can do harm to it is evil, therefore God has no personality.“)))). – Despite the appearance of a jovial hedonist, Picabia was described nihilistic and profoundly negative; an eminent mismatcher like Duchamp, he was likely to reply to anything by saying „Yes, but…“ or „No, but…“. Of himself he said, he is the anti-artist – and signed many of his aphorisms with „Francis Picabis, the funny chap“. Indeed, he was a kind of a joker in the art world, as he was actually more evasive than Duchamp: Whereas Duchamp was more radical concerning the means of doing art, Duchamp´s urinals etc. are profound oeuvre-like manifestations; Picabia´s paintings are somehow more difficult to grasp, they have a vanishing point in the creative implosion of painting and somehow contain their own swansong just to immeditately rise anew, fresh and impudent (though no less unstable; respectively it is that very specific mix between masterful, apollonian erection and chaotic, dionysian destruction/evasion that establishes a unique Picabiadian viewpoint on the usually contained inner forces of any great art). Going from floor to floor of the art palace, Picabia seemingly stops his paternoster always in an eccentric entresol respectively between two floors and then laughs from half below or three-quarters above. Hans Art called him a „Columbus of art“ (who „sails without a compass“), and Picabia had an influence on postmodernism and, specifically, Sigmar Polke. When Picabia was terminally ill he received a note from the aging Marcel Duchamp that simply said: „Cher Francis, à bientot.“