Composition
Vertical: 49 cm
Horizontal: 49 cm
2014
‘Composition has got much of the looks and the feel of a modernist painting from the 20/30-ies of the previous century. Malevich’s and Mondrian’s times.
But Composition is a Meta-painting. And so it is everything, even what it is not.
However dressed in the right looks and feel, something tells us that this ridiculously small Meta-painting could never be painted in the 20/30-ies of the previous century. There is a very light-hearted, even a somewhat teasing, quality manifesting itself, besides the huge seriousness, that was totally absent in the modernist paintings of the named masters. The spiritual elevation of man, by means of suprematism and neoplasticism, was not something to make fun of.
Meta-art is making fun of everything. Without ever letting seriousness go.
Meta-art, yes, is ironic. That too. But its irony is entirely beyond the often pretty poor irony of postmodernism.
If only because the biggest ambition in the arts ever, to express everything by means of almost nothing, often finds this expression in the smallest of possible Meta-paintings.’
From the chapter Size Matters,
from the book Meta-art
by Mick van Schooneveld
