The dreams of eternity, a void of nothingness, the sea of eccentricity.

Result #1

For this, the artist now returns us to the confines of the reality of what is painted, to the barrenness of the prints, which now, as an abandoned residue of old trash, supplies the salient texture of a work of art. The show is filled with trash, to the extent that it is accessible and inviting. As an enthusiastic and judicious nuit de ballet, it is a real flourish. But the margins of this exhibition are as arbitrary as the paintings themselves. Isolation and repetition are exploited, and they are not created through any of the processes of chance. There are no techniques, no possibilities of innovative expression. Art is pushed into an empty spot, and it can only be surmounted by the chaos of the trash which surrounds it. Its infinite depth is an eerie cadaver, a copy of the background of life, and that of the work of art.The rest of the exhibition is unfortunately brief. One may recognize some familiar pieces, but they are clearly not done by the artist. The 19th-century legacy of the Signac plate is with the panels, which he will hang at the Haus der Kunstverein in Berlin. This will mark the 10th anniversary of the exhibition, in which the art of Jörg Immendorff was screened in a Rotterdam show. There were no plans for this event. It was a clear gesture. But the artists are not very pleased with the negative view of their work that is presented by this exhibition.

Result #2

The work is pre-monochrome, approximately four feet in height and ten feet across, and weighs between twelve and fifteen pounds. From the floor of the gallery, a series of nine small color photographs of tiny dark spheres look as if theyd been pulled from an earthquake, and the overwhelming feeling of violent turbulence is partly relieved by the otherwise perfectly clear delineation of the interior. The balls appear to be ephemeral, floating, as if about to float and be all over the place. Later on, on a picture-within-a-picture, they are found floating upside down in the gallery air, floating not on the wall but almost in the light, as if magically held in the void by a strong current of light.It is a mystery to say exactly what this represents, but this image does provide an idea of the way an encounter with silence can initiate a powerful state of imagination. The spheres, drawn with great delicacy, seem to be floating through space, while they remain planted there. The wonders of creation are supported by the sublime emptiness of the structure and, after a sense of intense fascination with the absolutely literalizing of the forms, of the elemental, if somewhat absurd, eroticism of the figures themselves. What makes the geometrical figures so arresting, so inexplicable, so remarkable, is not their relative simplicity, but the fact that they can be almost instantly identified by an observer. This self-recognition implies a newness and a necessity for the work and for the viewers—and also for the space itself. In this respect, the weird, mysterious quality of the work is characteristic of Newman.

Result #3

At once the absence of reality and the presence of something real, an extraordinary, magnificent emptiness, a hollow void of unimaginable emptiness, and finally an exquisite, closed, fascinating emptiness.

Result #4

In his fascination with the unseen side of the world, Machado had no illusions about the end, but rather projected a long-term vision. But the surreal nature of his vision could never be misinterpreted. His magic remains only in the objects he makes with his fingers, in the sign of an act that remains invisible to us, a present without a duration.

Result #5

In a sense, the greatest successes of this show were those which paid homage to an art that for so long has been accused of valorizing art as the sole liberation from the reality of the world, and it has sometimes seemed that the further into the West we stand, the more the former value-markers offer us as recompense for the preceding progress toward the false freedom.There was a certain rare clarity in the juxtaposition of various works, which were always in part about themselves, about history, and about the way that history is written. The same might be said of the pottery pieces that were grouped here: they had a peculiarly American quality, but they were not exactly modernist abstractions, not quite so close to the real thing. And the solo paintings were quite different from the group that was shown here last year. They are never quite so magnificent as they could be, yet somehow end up not quite as they should have been. One thought of Bertolt Brecht, but also of Marcel Duchamp, in whom the political and the abstract meet in a kind of horizontal poetry that stands out in a contemporary milieu.