A living moment
No one is sure what MADI stands for, but 60 years after its birth, the playful look at colors and shapes continues to evolve.
By LENNIE BENNETT
Published July 9, 2006
TARPON SPRINGS
MADI wants some respect. Or just more recognition. For half a century or so, the movement has lived on the fringes of art history and criticism, like other art initiatives born in the years before and after World War II that witnessed the birth of dada, surrealism and abstract expressionism, all better known today. MADI can be considered a cousin to the first two movements and a complete refutation of the third.
"A Celebration of Geometric Art: MADI Homage to Carmelo Arden Quin" at the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art provides a small but good overview from its early days to the present.
Don't ask what MADI stands for. No one, including Volf Roitman, its most vociferous cheerleader, can tell you with consistency. Maybe it's made up, like dada; maybe it's a combination of letters from the name of its founder, Carmelo Arden Quin.
Better to ask what MADI is. It was founded in 1946 in Buenos Aires by a group of artists, mostly South American, led by Uruguayan Arden Quin.
Its roots are in European constructivism and abstraction and it found its fullest flowering in Paris, where Arden Quin moved in the 1940s and continues to live. At its most simple and attractive, MADI art is geometric and colorful with a sense of playfulness.
Works by Arden Quin, 93, with those by younger apostles, occupy one gallery at Leepa-Rattner. A second gallery is given over to Roitman's kinetic sculptures, and they are the main draw of the show.
Roitman, 75, lives with his wife, author Shelley Goodman, in the Tarpon Springs area for part of the year. Like Arden Quin, he was born in Uruguay, then studied architecture in Argentina, wrote poetry and plays, and edited an avant-garde arts magazine. He traveled to Paris in 1951 when he was 21, planning to continue his studies. A meeting with Arden Quin, 18 years his senior, redirected his course. Together they forged a relationship that brought the young MADI movement greater prominence and led Roitman, who thought his vocation was only writing, to painting and sculpture.
By the 1970s, the MADI movement had played itself out, at least in the public's mind. While individual artists attract attention, the formal MADI manifesto has been largely ignored when discussing South American artists.
Roitman, who is still close to Arden Quin, says his work today is less about loyalty to the movement and more about fidelity to the concept.
"It's a joyful expression," he said in an interview at the museum. "It's very various but basically it's about irregular forms, interrelated and interactive."
All the works in the exhibition share an asymmetry different from the geometric abstractions of Mondrian, for example, who was an influence in MADI's infancy, as were the cubist artists who experimented with collage. The difference is that these artists broke their two-dimensional art out of a frame, freeing the shapes, even making the canvas into a geometric shape. And you can see that artists such as Arden Quin and Roitman prefigured Pop Art by a decade.
While MADI is underpinned by philosophical didactic, it seems a burden when we can simply react to the bold use of color and purity of form. And those works with whimsy trump the sterner, more cerebral interpretations.
Lorenzo Piemonti's Cromoplastico is MADI at its most accessible, a satisfying assemblage of bright shapes. Salvador Presta's Homage to Luigi Nono consists of pastel-hued cubes strung on monofilament that vibrate like a harp when touched.
The Roitman gallery provides the real playground. His early work in collage led to paper cutouts that had an added dimension. Lasers allowed him to translate the technique to thin metal sheets he forms into cylinders and columns that exploit the filigreed surfaces. He puts the metal and paper cutouts on turntables and lights them to create changing perspectives and shadows. The enameled paper sculptures are especially fun because as they turn, gravity does its work, making the forms flip and flap like flowers unfolding or closing.
But that comparison to a flower is not a key to enjoying MADI art. While the artists believe that nature is composed of geometric shapes, they do not use nature as an inspiration. You will never see an approximation of a landscape in MADI art.
Roitman's most ambitious work is not here. It's the facade of an undistinguished building he reimagined for Dallas collectors Bill and Dorothy Masterson as an office for his law firm and a MADI museum housing their collection. The facade is covered with enormous versions of Roitman's cutouts that transform it from blah to boffo, better propaganda for MADI than any treatise.
During the interview, Roitman offered his services to the owner of "the ugliest building in Pinellas County. I will transform it," he said.
This is not art to take too seriously or view too deeply. Have fun with it. Roitman clearly does.
Lennie Bennett can be reached at (727) 893-8293 or lennie@sptimes.com
REVIEW
"A Celebration of Geometric Art: MADI Homage to Carmelo Arden Quin" is at the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art on the Tarpon Springs campus of St. Petersburg College, 600 Klosterman Road, through Aug. 20. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday. Open until 9 p.m. Thursday. Admission is $5 for adults with discounts for others. Free on Sunday. 727 712-5762 or www.spcollege.edu/museum.
Today at 2 p.m., artist Volf Roitman will conduct a free gallery walk through the exhibition.
On Thursday at 7 p.m., author Shelley Goodman, Roitman's wife, will speak about MADI founder Carmelo Arden Quin and sign copies of when art jumped OUT of its cage, her book about Quin. The lecture in the museum auditorium is $3 admission.