Ambiguous spatial structures

Exhibition of works by Osvaldo Bacman in the “Kunstzelle”

Osvaldo Bacman wants to convey not only visible appearances, but also mental moods, personal and real world experience with his close to being Op Art art objects.  Born in 1941 in Argentina, Bacman received early on a comprehensive artistic education.  In our country [i.e. Germany] he turned to geometrical abstraction, drew and painted through the ordering of basic shapes like square and rectangle optically perceptible spatial experiences.

The “Günter Güldner Kunstzelle Gallery” is currently exhibiting Osvaldo Bacman in the first one man show of his latest works in which the artist has also found a way to the third dimension.  Spatial structures arise from the Indian ink drawings of the early 1980s out of outlines or alternating light and dark surfaces placed next to each other.  Bacman builds up the objects out of thin card and plastic plates which produces a flat relief.  No true-to-life plastic interchange of dense structures is striven for therein, but an escalation of the underlying principle of ambiguity in all the works.

The eye experiences in a two part object the getting darker as they go towards the middle white-yellow-orange-red-blue rectangles of the upper half while in the bottom-tending layering Bacman builds an upward-pointing ladder into plastic space.  In opposition to this he places as a mirror in the lower half the process in reverse with regard to colours and space.

Such simple processes of shapes symmetrically disposed produce a visual and mental stimulus refined through rhythmic constellations in which our gaze is caught.  The flat square pyramid merely shifted along a diagonal that draws our gaze downwards in dense and far-flung gradations of light and dark now steeply, now gently, is fascinating.  From the bottom it feathers back up again however and along the curved edge of the squares falls back afresh and so becomes enveloped in an endless to-and-fro.

Bacman is not interested in pure visual irritation.  Such differentiated works rather impart through the finely fanned evaluations of space the experience of blocked and free-flowing feelings and meditations which move between the cramped Here and Now and Eternity.

SUSANNE LAMBRECHT

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