Absolutely Modern

     Jean Dewasne's Cinerama is an antifilth painting, done on so-called
cold aluminum, precise, and in red and yellow flat tints.  Its waves have
tenor-bells of claws, beaks, fishbones.
     Dewasne's canvases are primarily modern paintings.  On viewing them,
I was reminded of Rimbaud's statement.  "WE HAVE TO BE ABSOLUTELY MODERN."
It would take much more than a few lines, however, to interpret this state-
ment.  Mondrian, van Doesburg, El Lissitzky-- three abstract painters whom
I saw a great deal of-- wanted and felt themselves to be absolutely modern.
     Between 1917 and 1920 or 1925, Sophie and I fought for the precision
of the indefinable.  This may already contain a rudimentary interpretation
of Rimbaud's famous utterance.  Like us, Dewasne seeks precision.  Thus in
a way he is extending tradition through the monstrous chaos of our time.
We do not want to call mere ephemera real.  What we think we are circum-
scribing with the senses and reason is not necessarily real.  What can we
mean by ABSOLUTELY MODERN?  It is certainly not the terrifying, the threat-
ening, the horrible, the noisy aspects of our modern machine-world in which
most living people feel sheltered.  This world is simply the curtain con-
cealing the true mise-en-scène of the eternal spectacle.  Dewasne's paintings
are not ornamental treasures, nor a "hasty decor" as Seuphor would say, for
they are rooted in a primordial deepness.  Their gaiety, their anti-tragical
appearance seems unwilling to admit that this root lies deep in absolute
modernism, in infinity.

BACK TO 1953

BACK TO ARP MAIN PAGE