It has become both the burden and the priviledge of art in modernity on the one hand to confirm the split between nature and humanity, on the other to contain a longing for reconciliation between these two poles. The concept of a similarity between the forms of nature and the forms of art manifested by the unity of the supreme good, truth and beauty was wrecked in the end of the 18. century and this essentially gave birth to modern art that never since really let the idea of a primordial unity disappear. The avantgarde has always even in its most subjectivist forms insisted on the epistemological power of art. From suprematism to abstract expressionist painting art is connected with forces outside time and space of the single work - and even in movements that insist emphatically on the autonomy of art one finds in one sense or another the concept of the work as an entrance to something great and unknown being within the reach of the magic forces of art.
The kind of subjectivism that has characterized modernity and especially modern art one could thus also describe as a prayer or plea for contact with nature an sich, nature in itself. And nature understood not as chaos but as order, as a both selfsufficient and comprehensive order that might even function as a consolation to modern man's experience of living abandoned in the shadow of a vacuum, threatened by total contingency. August Strindberg, the world-famous Swedish writer and painter, worked with and in this conflict and is hence the modern artist par excellence. On the one hand he is part of the radical modernist movement which in the end of the 19. century together with Nietzsche made any given order vanish and sanctified man as his own sovereign. On the other hand he is sitting, one summer in the middle of Europe, laying photosensitive paper out in the night under the shining stars with the purpose of eliminating the human mediation of natural order and beaty. He sees the photographic lenses almost as symbols of the agonizing distance between humanity and nature and he hopes to be able to represent without distorsion. Without mediation. Hopes that photography can be replaced by the photogram - a less manipulated representation.
Now one thing is mediation as possible distorsion of natural order, quite another matter is the question whether nature has such a thing as order. In many ways Nietzsche's perspectivism has during the 20. century and especially during the last decade been revised due to scientific research and reflection. The concept of autopoietic processes has thus made parts of science more edifying than art has ever dreamt of, namely by bringing forth a new realism that might conceive cultural phenomena - language and iconography for example -as isomorphic with what we normally categorize as natural phenomena. So nature turns out to be the order that artist have dreamt of during modernity. Or to put in other words: chaos is also order. The opposition between chaos and order is not ontological, it is epistemological.
The danish artist Eli Ponsaing, born 1922 and professor at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, has for many years worked in this modern tension between nature and art, between world and work. The word that points out the tension and at the same time marks the center of his oeuvre is the word 'composition'. Composition is something else than creation. Composition is intervention in or administration of something given and thus confirms already on this conceptual level a relation between the material of the work of art and its expressive gestures. One of the most evident media concerning this relation is of course photography, and Ponsaing has for many years in fact worked graphically with photography. He has transformed for example apparently chaotic ruins into states of compositional equilibrium and thereby pointed out both a potential order in the world and the compositional eye not as invention but discovery.
Recently, Ponsaing has narrowed his eye but only almost magically to widen out the perspectives of his work. He has found a vertigous beauty and order in processes of chrystallisation. The discovery in itself is not new - man has for centuries been fascinated by chrystal phenomena like ice flowers and snowflakes -, but Ponsaing has turned the discovery into graphic works and hereby created an art that is both new and has the above mentioned relations to the most intrinsic dreams of modern aesthetics.
His graphic works are a result of photoengraving with photopolymer-plates. Ponsaing produces a chrystallisation of a chemical substance on transparent foil. He then transfers a chosen sector hereof - normally not more than one square centimeter - to the sensitive photopolymer-plate from which he finally can print. Ponsaing's interventions are partly compositional, partly they relate to some kind of control with the proces of chrystallisation, which for example depends on phenomena like temperature, time and gradient of the foil during the proces.
The result is surprising, thought-provoking and -beautiful. Surprising because the chrystallisations reveal not only an order, but also an order that we know from daily macrophysical experience. It is namely in many ways the structure and form of plants that shows itself in Ponsaing's graphic works. Leaves, branches, boughs, trees form a magic forest whose perspective space takes us to the category which describes the essence of the works: landscape. And this is thought-provoking because precisely the concept of nature as landscape has had, during the history of art, the function of reconciliation between humanity and nature. Even in its sublime forms the effect and metaintention of landscape painting have always been the producing of a place where man and nature can meet.
Ponsaing's graphic worlds are such landscapes, where more or less sensitive plants dramatize their growth between the organic order of gemmation and the aggression of fire. Some of the works can thus be ominous in their letting a world come forth, where spawn, weeds, and filth, a leprous scum, has made the running rivulet thick and dumb, and at its outlet flags huge as stakes and dammed it up with roots knotted like water-snakes... -- while other works give the mind the peace of meditation, the almost empty concentration on the oscillation between repition and variation.
Finally, Ponsaing's graphic works are beautiful both for the thought and for the eye - in opposition to the fractals that until now have only been producing kitsch. And precisely by speaking both to thought and the eye Ponsaing's graphic works place themselves in another aesthetic tradition which however has had the same purpose and intentions as our landscape painting. It's the tradition of ornamental painting, the tradition of ornament. Precisely ornament can be seen as a manifested boundary between humanity and nature. A boundary however that is binding. When Kant in his "Kritik der Urteilskraft" talked about art he just thought of ornament and horticultural beauty - and modern art can in many ways be related to kantian concepts.
With his graphic works, his chrystallograms, Eli Ponsaing thus continues essential reflections on modern art and on the boundary between art and science.
Eli Ponsaing's graphic works are for sale. Price: US $160. Dkr. 1000,-, sending included. Send the money to the adress below and use the number in the left corner of the corner of the picture to mark your choice. Eli Ponsaing, Caroline Amalievej 16, 2800 Lyngby, Danmark.
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