Book's extract
"This is not a retrospective"
How do stiffness and dynamics shape the structure? What does a structure need to support the whole? What openness to variations is possible, even necessary? When does a structure disintegrate to reform? How does a transformation occur within a structure? And how do we grasp the similarity of a structure in different appearances? Valentiner gives an explicit motive to his latest works. He calls "Hurricane" the black and white shapes that condense in a vortex towards the center of the image.
He calls "Hurricane" the black and white shapes that condense into a vortex towards the center of the image.
Reduced to black and white, they seem more precise than Valentiner's fields of colored structures. If in previous paintings the eye was always lost in the confusion of colors and abstract anonymity, it is now inevitably drawn to depth and meaning. Valentiner shows that the structure is energized and that the diversity of forms becomes a movement. While he has so far been interested in the impenetrability of complex structural fabrics, he now focuses his artistic interest on individual processes within structure.
The element of these images is not irritation, but the focusing of the gaze on a single basic figure. If Valentiner uses technology to compose these variations, it only confirms his belief that structure is more powerful than man. What counts for him is not the unique course of a brushstroke, but the clarity of an image that goes beyond the small efforts of individual agitation. The human self is as impotent and insignificant as human culture as a whole, in that it is only an insignificant prior case in the universe. However, or precisely for this reason, men stubbornly renew the assertion of their power and their specificity. Despite all knowledge of psychology, the ego celebrates itself unimpressed by all human faults and unpredictability.
Nature continues to be "mistress" of her own house. And even disturbances in the balance of nature's cycle have so far made no difference to the fact that Western culture is continuing the bold and destructive course of its domination over nature.
