L'idea del colore: Jorrit Tornquist

Jorrit Tornquist. “Colour is space in itself”

“Colour is space in itself,” Jorrit Tornquist wrote in 1974, precisely at the moment when his creative identity emerged with definitive clarity: the centrality of colour, approached problematically through the codes of Nouvelle Tendance, yet without becoming entangled in the methodological fideism then prevalent; and, having acknowledged the debts owed to his cultural climate, affirming the uncompromisingly secular nature of his desire to be an artist.

From the outset, Tornquist was more Milanese than a product of the Austrian milieu which, at the time, still offered, through the Trigon Biennial founded in Graz in 1963, the only significant opportunity for international avant-garde exchange. He therefore did not assume the sanctified role of the artist, but instead concentrated on looking, and on making others look, exploring a form of creation that would not be the arbitrary expression or whim of the individual, but rather a circulating and shareable culture. As Walter Gropius had already intuited in Weimar in 1919, it was a form of thinking through looking that would “embrace architecture, sculpture and painting in a single unity”, and, above all, an ethically clarified form of sensibility.

The theoretical stance and methodological rigour so evident in the artist’s work should, in many respects, also be understood as part of this cultural climate. In Zoo, or Letters Not About Love (1923), Viktor Shklovsky wrote: “Method reigns in the world. Man invented method. METHOD. Method left the house and began a life of its own.” This is not an issue concerning only the artistic neo-avant-gardes, but rather a kind of original sin of the historical avant-garde itself: necessary in its time, yet soon transformed into a bureaucratic certificate of identity to be displayed as a passport by those whom Ezra Pound dismissed as “parasites”.

In Tornquist, however, formative rigour operates in a very different way, because it is not an end but merely a necessary premise and an obligatory passage. As early as 1966, Umbro Apollonio wrote that his aesthetic objects possessed a “heightened lyrical value” and embodied “the transformation of the quantified rational into qualitative significance”. Above all, they were concrete aesthetic things, not mere demonstrations of what might be possible.

From today’s perspective, it is clear that what Tornquist has pursued with tenacity and inexhaustible energy ever since has always been a search for the essential, stripped of adjectives: an essential that, for the viewer, has everything to do with knowing and feeling oneself alive. This applies equally to the extraordinary architectural project of the Nuovo termoutilizzatore di A2A, Brescia, 1996, and to the pictorial polyptych Petals, 2002, in which a fascination with biology is translated into chromatic matter.

A note by Tornquist dated 1968, now published in the monograph Jorrit Tornquist. Color – Works (2006), leaves little room for misunderstanding. He wrote: “Programmed art runs the risk, despite my approval of its conscious and logical procedure, of becoming rigid, of turning into a skeleton, of no longer allowing us to perceive the breath, the pulsation of the blood that is life. Programmed art runs the risk of becoming decoration or a programme for the sake of the programme; reception takes place solely on an intellectual level, there is no air, the air that makes us feel the wind and allows us to breathe, there is no environment: art is environment, atmosphere, which makes us live and experience. It does not matter whether the dimension is 1, 2, 3 or 4; the environment is there. What matters is that it makes us walk or, as Matisse wanted, makes us ‘sit in an armchair’, so that forests and meadows of fairy tales may be recreated and we can move enchanted through the everyday world and thus rediscover the essential. I have attempted to construct formal associations that should facilitate walking, breathing, being subdued, being.”

For Tornquist, colour is the problematic matter not only of our seeing, but also the very matter of seeing itself. His work is always driven by a desire to place us in a necessary relationship with the very substance of vision, within a dynamic in which the psychological conditions of the subject and those of the environment are not secondary factors, but themselves fundamental qualities.

His engagement with Goethe’s Farbenlehre, certainly, is grounded in an affirmation of emotional intelligence, while the influence of Wassily Kandinsky is equally perceptible, above all in Tornquist’s absolute fidelity to abstraction and to the idea of colour as the material of exploration and of vision itself. His investigation of green as a possible “fourth primary”, suggested by numerous works by Tornquist, can likewise be understood as a Kandinskian legacy.

The decisive turning point came in 1974, with his solo exhibition in Milan at Team Colore, a group of a few artists who, in different ways, chose to go “off the beaten path”, according to Cesare Brandi’s early and perceptive intuition. In the introductory text, Gillo Dorfles described a practice in which “colour, space and man’s self-awareness interact with one another”. It is no coincidence that, shortly afterwards, Dadamaino—herself an important figure emerging from Nouvelle Tendance and a significant interlocutor for Tornquist—presented her Cromorilievi on the same walls at Team Colore, the first results of the transformation she had initiated with the Inconscio Razionale series in 1975. Nor is it coincidental that Ignacio Matte Blanco’s formulation of “bi-logic” emerged at the same time: his book The Unconscious as Infinite Sets: An Essay in Bi-Logic was published precisely in 1975, generating intense, undisciplined attention and readings beyond the field of psychoanalysis and restoring centrality to the emotional factor.

“It is a kind of writing of the mind, my own […]. But clearly, if the hand is guided by the mind, in this case it is guided by the unconscious,” Dadamaino reflected.

The rationale upon which Tornquist founded his identity emerged from a form of looking that, like that of the wise Apollonius of Lamia in John Keats’s 1819 poem, is “keen, cruel, perceant, stinging”: sharp, ruthless, penetrating, piercing. It is a gaze that digs far beyond what exists in search of essence, yet never considers itself separate from life, from the dynamics of the senses, from a dimension that is not merely metric, but which metric contains and distils. It is a way of looking and making others look, revealed in its purest form yet belonging fully to the measure of life.

For Tornquist, whose background in biology was accompanied by a culture of experimentation that, above all, attributes absolute primacy to making, this was also a way of definitively escaping the academisation of new art in terms of taste, and the remnants of an abstraction création reduced to a mere repertoire of technical procedures. If absolute abstraction had been a way of advancing artistic research beyond the question of verisimilitude, Tornquist entered the art world after the fundamental rupture had already taken place, when abstraction had become an officially accepted language—language and dialect, consciousness and echo. He could therefore pose, and ask others to pose, subtler questions, in the name of a criticism that was not merely conventional but fully lived.

The artist was well aware that his position was that of an uncompromising insoumis, neither aligned nor alignable, and that the success he should rightly aspire to was not worldly success, but that of one who, in any circumstances, maintains a firm hold on the critical thread of artistic practice. He did not shape his research according to the external standards of taste; instead, he turned his works into instruments that compel the viewer to engage in a dynamic awareness of the self.

In practical terms, of course, Tornquist knew, like few others, all the techniques of the accomplished image-maker. Yet to brand the results according to what viewers might find more gratifying, more “beautiful”, was impossible for him: it would have contradicted decades of experience.

It is a text by Alberto Veca, one of the most lucidly perceptive voices in contemporary criticism, that addresses the fundamental question of Tornquist’s mature work. In the catalogue for his retrospective exhibition at the Pinacoteca Comunale di Macerata in 1979, Veca emphasised “the attention to the communicative process as a whole that explains the distinctive quality of Tornquist’s interventions within the field of colour”. These works nonetheless ensure that “this empty portion of the surface does not have a flatly didactic function: rather, it indicates the very quality, both material and illusionistic, of the overlapping fields, their extension and, if we wish, also their duration”; “thus the viewer becomes an active term in the process” and “in this way the work presents itself as a metaphorical instrument of knowledge and self-awareness”, carrying the fullness of its emotional intelligence.

In the final stages of his career, Tornquist continually renewed the problematic complexity of his interventions, fully aware that by doing so he was distancing himself—rather than making himself more accessible—from identification as an author, with all the consequences this entailed in terms of worldly acceptance, recognition within the primary art market, and so forth. Yet one certainty remained: whoever looks at these works can “perceive the breath, the pulsation of the blood that is life”.

Flaminio Gualdoni