In Memory of Iris Peruga
Analogues and Opposites
The creative activities of Gerd Leufert (Memel, Germany, today Lithuania, 1914 - Caracas 1998) encompassed most of the commonly used artistic mediums of his time, establishing noteworthy precedents in the fields and genres in which he worked. His astonishing intuition, coupled with his interest in experimentation, forged many significant paths in the artistic practice in Venezuela, and established the foundations for the profession of graphic designer, a trade he dedicated himself to when he arrived in the country in 1951.
He worked as a designer, draughtsman, engraver, painter and sculptor, as well as teacher and curator, and he also explored photography successfully in his final years. Gerd Leufert personifies the restless and shrewd creator who is able to recognize and respond to the problems posed by the art of his time.
Educated at the Hannover School of Design and later at Munich’s Fine Arts Academy under the guidance of renowned designer and typographer Fritz H. Ehmcke, Leufert possessed a solid foundation of theoretical and technical knowledge which he immediately applied to his first working experiences upon his arrival in Venezuela. The avant-garde artistic movements that shook Europe between the wars, the implementation of the modern project, which considered design production and craftsmanship based on the criteria of form and function, and the new technologies and inventions backed by the industrial revolution were the references upon which Leufert built his multidisciplinary identity. With a friendly and enterprising personality, he interacted with a select group of professionals and artists with whom he developed new projects and ideas and productive and lasting friendships. In 1952 he met and began his relationship with the artist Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt, Hamburg, 1912 - Caracas 1994), at whose side he remained until the end of her life.
Leufert cultivated a radial pattern of activity that went from graphic design to artistic work without conflicts or hierarchies, and made use of elements from different practices that refuted the academic protocols of art and reestablished the designer’s creativity. Of Leufert’s vast body of work one can say that it is at once analogous and opposite, and that it bases its development in the deep understanding of structure given to him by design. It is analogous because regardless of the medium and the technique, it shares conceptual and formal features and similarities. It is opposite because of the symmetry of contraries that favors the recovery of the ontological sense of form, in other words the forms that have not yet been imbued with meaning[1], and whose narrative is only its validity in time: the possibility (or impossibility) of giving way to semantic content. Hence, as in the case with Nenias (1985), the unsettling tension they excite in the keen spectator.
For the exhibition being shown at Henrique Faria Fine Art, a general selection has been made, at a proportional scale, which attempts to account for the ample production of this exceptional artist.
In the back gallery are three monochromes from the nineteen fifties and early sixties. They are the earliest works, created basically in black or white. The same-colored plane operates as a background over which plastic episodes of color and texture take place. Although the pieces are of an abstract nature, in cases such as AM (1956), the longitudinal line that runs through it refers to the horizon and therefore to a diffuse and distant landscape. On display in the same gallery are three drawings of equal size, which under the same name Untitled (1959), recall the stages of inking lithographic plates with a roller. The resources and experience of the designer who observes his daily work with the sensibility of an artist reappear. These experiments of light and shadow find their maximum expression in Composición azul (Blue Composition) (1956), in which an incidental grid, made of thick lines of black ink, defies the passage of light and color. Here, we can also appreciate a group of untitled ink and gouache drawings that belong to the same group shown in the exhibition Espacios imaginarios y reales, Tintas de Gerd Leufert, at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas in 1994. There, Northern European landscapes were shown, resembling exercises in freestyle graphic design and abstract drawings. They serve as a continuation of the previously mentioned works but sublimate nature from the landscape. This group of drawings was made over a period of three decades: sixties, seventies and eighties, and one could say that formally they are close to the monochromes, which is why they are being shown together. With this analogy the movement from one support to another, and even more so the shift in the poetics of the medium, can be appreciated. Nevertheless, Leufert’s ability to create on the plane spaces of different qualities from the synthesis imposed by graphic design, similarities that have their origin in his typographic and calligraphic work, remains noticeable. Let us recall that Leufert was an expert designer of alphabets, and as a communicator he exercised the mastery of joining the semantic with the visual content of the message.
The series New York Drawings (1963) is comprised of eighteen drawings of graphite on paper, only a few of which are being shown because they were made during an extended trip to the city. In these drawings the geometry of the circle is predominant. To draw them, Leufert filled in the thickness of the lines that define them making evident the lines in graphite. At the same time, a treatment of sfumatura makes them look nebulous. Ruth Auerbach said that in one of them “the frame that alternates red and blue strips dominates the plane, creating an illusory perspective that, as a certain principle and point of view, doubtless prefigures the approaches that a decade later were proposed by his Listonados.”[2]
In the front gallery are the large format paintings created in the nineteen sixties and the Listonados from the seventies. In the Venezuelan art world, in which abstract geometrical tendencies, in particular kinetic and neoplastic, reigned, Gerd Leufert’s work did not seem to be interested in optical phenomena or movement. Following his early works, most of them predominantly black and white, he turned his attention toward a free, instinctive and radical treatment of the color planes, the contrasts of proportion, disposition, and rotation of the forms over the pictorial surface. The paintings form geometries of chromatic extensions and linear elements that are occasionally also organic, sinuous in their edges and unexpected in their contrasts. These works manifest the inheritance of design with the freedom of the creative act. Nevertheless, it is clear that his experience in the field of design would determine his knowledge and mastery of the visual grammar with which he constructed his language.
A number of Listonados are exhibited next to his paintings as a kind of dialogue and counterpoint. These rectangular frames of different geometries, shapes and colors, propose a playful and insightful approach insofar as they question the plane as the space of the art object but at the same time determine their movement to an accessory object. With this game of opposites an analogy is set out between the frame and the empty pictorial plane in terms of meaning and, at the same time, a symmetry of values assigned by the canon that the work contravenes is established. Let us conclude with the words of Juan Calzadilla, who has said that “Leufert has demonstrated that he is an experimental artist. His work signifies in each period a point of evolution always conditioned by the possibilities the materials offer him and by the need to be contemporary.”[3]
Tahía Rivero
[1] The concept of an empty form of preconceived content is put forth by Victoria De Stefano in the text of the catalogue for Gerd Leufert, Nenias, Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas, 1985.
[2] Auerbach, Ruth. Construyendo el vacío, in the catalogue for the exhibition Enmarcando a Gerd Leufert. Sala TAC, Caracas, 2014, p. 18.
[3] Calzadilla, Juan. VIII Bienal de São Paulo, 1965, Venezuela: Jacobo Borges, Francisco Hung, Gerd Leufert. Instituto Nacional de Cultura y Bellas Artes, Caracas, 1965.