Modifications as a pioneer of CAPA

Martin van Zomeren (front), Freddy Flores Knistoff (background), and Rik Lina (right) worked on a few "Modifications" in 1992 at the Galerie 13 in Hannover.

There are a few things to say about this great and unknown picture taken by Mauricio Jalil at the Galerie 13 in Hannover but first of all, I would like to remark on perhaps the work produced at this "happening" as a kind of intent of doing "Modifications". This is very important due to the fact that CAPA never worked in this format/idea but only Collective Automatic Painting or Automatic Painting. Freddy tells us that he especially brought some posters from the Stedelijk Museum with the intention of painting them over at the opening of this exhibition (these posters remain today at the Galley 13). Regarding this, we all already know that Freddy from the beginning before CAPA was already interested in "Modification" due to the influence of Asger Jorn, but he never realized that this could be the impetus to create the Collective Automatic Painting. In fact, Collective Automatic Painting is a kind of Process Art where the painting is modified in situ several times so it is continuously "Modified" in favor of the final result. Obviously here, this still wasn't theorized and wasn't thought through but the idea was there from the beginning. I also believe that the only in understand this idea was only Freddy since "Modification" is an artistic process that is very difficult to understand and it takes many years to be able to understand it, what is more, very recently it has been possible to develop an artistic process that is linked to the "Collaborative" more than the "Collective" or "Destructive" or "Vandalized". The Modification in painting is rather an act of working with what is found, discovering a hidden path of the narrative that has been put before us. It is not about covering what exists, much less destroying it. It is adaptation and discovery. About this picture, we also know that only a few CAPA participants participated due to the fact that this exhibition was a "collective" where were invited various artists from the International Surrealism collective at that moment also linked with Edouard Jaguer. Freddy tells us that the curator of the gallery was a very good friend of Jaguer and just before this exhibition called "Crossing Borders" in German "Grenzänge" he made an exhibition called "Methamorphases" which gathered artists from Phases. However, this exhibition brought together the following artists: 

 

Freddy Flores Knistoff (Amsterdam), Karol Baron (Bratislava), Guy Ducornet (Le puy Notredame), Rikki Ducornet (Denver), Kathleen Fox (Wales), Marco Fragasso (Hannover), Mathias Lyssy (Göttingen), Miguel Lohlé (Amsterdam), Rik Lina (Amsterdam), Paul Goodman (Gouda), Paul Hammond (London), Dave Bobroske (Utrecht), Conroy Maddox (London), Tony Pusey (Örkelljunga), Carlos Re (Argentina), Gerald Stack (London), Katharina van Hoffs (Hannover), Geert van Mulken (Amsterdam), Gerda van der Krans (Nijmegen), Martin van Zomeren (Amsterdam), John Welson (London), Philip West (Zaragoza), Rainer Wichering (Hannover), Mauricio Jalil (Santiago de Chile / Amsterdam) and Michael Woods (London).

Make Collective Automatic Painting wasn't planned

"Worlds in Collision II"
CAPA painting from Freddy Flores Knistoff and Rik Lina (1991)
(acrylic, oil, ink, enamel and collage over canvas, 140 x 100 cm) 

When did the aesthetic-pictorial movement of "collective automatic painting" began?

Under this statement, several issues that deserve and require a small analysis to contrast certain information that sometimes appears diffuse and at the same time confusing with respect to the same origin of this movement, and for this, it is necessary to refer to Freddy Flores Knistoff, yes perhaps, the most important of the founders of this magnificent movement of automatic and experimental artists, being here where we break down and throw some small rays of light to this exciting story that in 2021 turned 30 and that it is already for 31 years. A confusing document is that of some photographs dated in November 1991 in which Rik Lina appears next to Freddy Flores Knistoff performing several automatic paintings in a gallery of art and about what appears to be an installation. The story behind these photographs is very interesting since it turns out that Freddy and Rik along with other invited artists (called in the publication as Droomschaar artists, something completely wrong, since they only participated in the publication but were not artists linked entirely to this anarchist-surrealist collective, perhaps in exception of Rik Lina) went to visit the exhibition of the Automatic Swedish-German artist K. R. H. Sonderborg at the Boër Gallery of Hannover and in which the same painter was going to perform a performance but that for reasons we unknown, the artist in question could not attend and were Rik and Freddy who offered to work on the arranged material. All in all, that was never planned and did not paint collectively but only painted "automatically" for saying it in a way. This vanishes the story behind these photographs.

One realises that the more one digs, the more one finds talismans that one has to look at closely, and that is what is happening with the history of CAPA, its foundation, which until now had remained hidden. And the more one digs, the more one realises that this movement of artists that arose in Amsterdam would never have arisen if it had not been for the activity of Freddy Flores Knistoff in his conversations with Rik Lina about automatism, Freddy himself tells us that they got together and created automatic painting, these conversations being the fruit of the discovery if perhaps by chance the objective of the foundation of Collective Automatic Painting, painting in this way was never planned. To this must be added that Freddy had already been working under experimental precepts that linked him to Modificationism and that from the beginning he promoted this career through the experience he had of other pictorial movements such as CoBrA, Roberto Matta, North American Abstract Expressionism and Modificationism (called in other ways according to its subject matter and application - Appropriationism, Ready Made, Interventionism, among others). It is also interesting to note that CAPA did not start out as CAPA, in fact, as Freddy tells us, it never presented itself as something closed or as an indissoluble group of artists, but quite the opposite, as a transversal and free space for the intellectual exchange of ideas linked to painting and automatism and that this "name" arose only to label the group of artists who worked at a key moment in the history of Collective Automatic Painting and that was in the exhibition "Phases-Surrealismo e Contemporaneidade del Museo de Arte Contemporânea de São Paulo en Brasil en 1997" curated by the critic Daisy Peccinini, which also labelled the group of artists under the title of "the new CoBrA", the first exhibition to refer to "CAPA". All in all, an exhibition which, as is well known, coincided with the bifurcation of its members Freddy and Rik, displacing Rik Lina within the parameters of International Surrealism, rather than Automatic Painting itself, and Freddy with his interests linked to "Modificationism" and "Absolute Automatism" in the same pictorial language. However, the most important of all this is that according to Freddy, "CAPA did not exist, I invited Rik to my studio to work, because he did not have a studio in 1991, and from there we created the first collective automatic paintings in a highly experimental period". In this sense, it is also very important to point out that it was Freddy Flores Knistoff who encouraged the Dutch painter to work collaboratively and that it was in Kennedylaan's studio that the first collective automatic works signed by both artists were created. According to Freddy, during this year's production, around twenty large and medium format works were produced, of which here are two magnificent works "titled" by Rik Lina as "Worlds in Collision". About this, we know that Freddy never liked to title the works as each work itself represents an infinite search for pictorial knowledge and that it refers only to itself. Nevertheless, one as a researcher is grateful for a reference for documentary purposes.

 

"Worlds in Collision I"
CAPA Painting from Freddy Flores Knistoff and Rik Lina (1991)
(acrylic, oil, ink, enamel and collage over canvas, 140 x 100 cm) 

The avant-garde won’t give up

Collective Automatic Painting over wall and Gerda van der Krans "automatic sculptures" at the Gallery 13 (Germany, Hannover) during a "Collective Automatic Painting" exhibition held in October 1992. In the picture: Freddy Flores Knistoff (front) and Dave Dobroske (background) working (Action Painting) over Gerda sculptures hanged in the same wall, creating a sort of a Collective Automatic Experimental Installation. This picture was taken by Mauricio Jalil (photographer and friend of Freddy)

Making a nemotechnical exercise through the dense documentation that involves the History of Art and this movement of automatic artists and, always attending the main source of such context through the automatic artist Freddy Flores Knistoff; we see how from the beginning of the practice of Collective Automatic Painting there was a continuity with ideas related to the "Modificationism" as a field of experimentation. This is how Freddy tells us that even before the realization of the countless canvases he realized next to Rik Lina in 1991 at the Kennedylann studio in Amsterdam; he already worked for several years under the aesthetic concepts of the "Modificationism", proof of this, are the same works that he shared in other artistic activities and publications prior to the emergence of the Collective Automatic Paintings, such as the publications of the Anarchist-Surrealist magazine "Droomschaar" (pictures (1), (2)) or the same Freddy exhibitions at Hannover Gallery 13. Wathever the case may be, the experimental opening that occurred in CAPA always operated as a skillful conservator of this artistic trend and that Freddy himself inserted from the beginning in performing what it means today CAPA. On the history of "Modificationism" there is a capital and mandatory text for the understanding of this variant or rather, knowledge of what it was "the last European vanguard" from a historiographical point of view. The thesis in question is that of the researcher and Art Historian Karen Kurczynski, (today associated Professor of Art History at the University of Massachusetts) entitled: "Expressions as Vandalism: Asger Jorn's" Modifications "published in the research magazine of the University of Massachusetts in 2008, "Anthropology and Aesthetics" Volume 53-54 in Association with the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University; text that we include integrally below. To recap, the text in question talks about the importance of this "trend" that arose around 1959 under other aesthetic concepts such as that of the "New Disfigurations" in the work of Asger Jorn and soon from other artists such as Enrico Baj and Daniel Spoerri and who drank other artistic solutions contributed by the genius of Marcel Duchamp . However, each artist understood in a different way the hatching of this type of artistic solution but unwittingly opened a new field of experimentation that until today has been maintained as something innate of contemporary artistic production. It is also interesting to note that this type of attitude arose as a protest, a protesting attitude that protested - if you will forgive the repetition- about the alienation of the historical vanguard's by the Parisian Artistic Academy. Therefore, we could say that this protest arose as a new solution to the demands of a context marked by the "robbery and mercantilism" of the historical avant-garde's and what is already popularly accepted as valid. That is why the new "Modification" movement was presented as the last great and genuine movement or "ism" of liberation of Arts.

Expression as Vandalism: Asger Jorn's "Modifications" by Karen Kurczynski 

 

(1)

(2)

Transformations in Surrealism, towards automatism / abstract expressionism, Édouard Jaguer and the Phases magazine

The Jaguer's (Édouard & Simone) were absolutely committed with the dissemination of the poetry and visual arts of the last international European avant-gardes. Édouard Jaguer (1924-2006) was a great poet and essayist-critic and his articles on artists from very diverse and remote places were published in several books and magazines such Terzo Occhio, La Main à la Plume, La Revolution la Nuit, Le Surréalisme Révolutionnaire, Rixes, CoBrA, Boa, Il Gesto, Salamandre, La tortue-lièvre, La Brèche, Aujourdh'hui, XXième Siècle, Ellébore, Les Deux Soeurs, La Tour de Feu, La Nef, as well as in the Phases magazine itself (from its first number in 1954). Likewise, the artistic (graphic design) and curatorial direction (documentary ordering) of this great magazine was completely made by himself. We also know that the magazine was self-financed thanks to a greates curatorship that in special issues included original work by the artists presented under the auspices of the magazine. These original works, as a rule, were in small format (usually signed engravings). However, it mus be said that Phases was not only a magazine. It was a new Movement. A new Movement that started in 1952 which sought to unify the visual culture of its time, the most historical Surrealism ideas and aesthechics with the "new" branches of the "lyrical abstraction" that Andre Breton always considered as the true forms of automatism and that Breton work together with the french critic Charles Estienne in its development. The early fifties is one of the most interesting moments of the Surrealism history due to the battle of its supresion in the History of Art or rememorance, great personalities of this time and its problematics can be found in the french critics Charles Estienne and Michel Tapié. Anyway, Phases standed up in the middle of this epic battle to reunite both movements and artistic tendencies under one voice, the voice of the Experimental Arts. Phases continued its activities until Jaguer died in 2006 leaving a vast catalogue of artists encounteers and ideas that today we continue researching. 

Édouard Jaguer was a link, for all artists linked to the historical Surrealism and historical Experimentalists in favor of the avant-garde and the progress of contemporary art of that time. The Jaguers invested everything they had in their task of advancing this movement. Jaguer had a business that made belt buckles. Also, he operated as an active art merchant and had a very good relationship with various galleries around europe and France. One of these is the parisian gallery "1900-2000" which still remains under the greatest curator Marcel Fleiss. Édouard Jaguer, from a young idealist and fighter, also participated with a group of French Resistance against Nazism and the invasion of France. About Simone, we know that she was a skilled collagist who, in anonymity, signed her works under the pseudonym Anne Ethuin and to preserve the Dada wisdom.

All in all, this picture it is an unpublish faithful testimony of this activity. Here we can see Freddy Flores Knistoff (founder of CAPA) presenting a series of works of his authorship to Édouard and Simone Jaguer. Édouard Jaguer was a great fan of CAPA's work (Knistoff branch), a pity that they did not manage to develop the exhibition project that was beginning to take shape in their minds due to his early death. This photo was taken in 2000 by a friend of Freddy and on the background we can see a large collection of paintings from greatest artists liked to the Surrealism and Experimental Art history, like Enrico Baj, Pierre Alechinsky, Toyen and Cristian D'Orgeix.

 Freddy Flores Knistoff at Jaguer's Studio in París. From left to right, Édouard Jaguer, Freddy Flores Knistoff and Simone Jaguer in 2000.