Vera Molnar's Collage Practice Explored in Recent Exhibition

The gallery Berthet-Aittouares is highlighting the collage work of Vera Molnar, emphasizing its role as a fundamental method in her artistic construction. Molnar began using cut and arranged forms in the early 1950s, initially as models for paintings or as finished collages, with gouached papers offering flexibility. During this period, she engaged friends, both artists and non-artists, in manipulating these cut papers in her studio, pinning or pasting them to walls to challenge aesthetic and mental conventions like the golden ratio, symmetry, balance, and color harmony—what she termed 'cultural mental ready-mades.' Another research approach involved writing programs to generate forms under constraints, such as in 'Structure from the Letter N' (1961). After 1968, Molnar employed computers and graphic palettes to create new visual proposals and variations, fostering a dialogue between hand and machine that allowed for seemingly impossible or aberrant ideas. She continued to find inspiration in collage, notably admiring Victor Vasarely's use of sharp, cut, and pasted forms. Over the years, Molnar developed other series using materials like transparent overlapped films to create simple, overlapping shapes and generate what she described as 'freely suprematist little ballets.' Her arrangements often feature interstices, gaps, fissures, and subtle shifts, giving truncated, split, tilted, or joined quadrilaterals a dynamic quality as air infiltrates, making them sway or tilt. Through this playful yet rigorous cut-and-paste technique, Molnar reinvests archetypal forms from Western visual culture. The article originally appeared on Paris Art.