Nick Darmstaedter’s solo show at Bugada&Cargnel resolved thanks to a letter written almost 500 years ago

 

 

Answering the third argument, painters say that it is quite true that the purpose of both arts is the imitation of Nature, but which of the two comes closer to this end will be discussed later. Here we shall only say that sculptors do not imitate Nature more because they work in three dimensions, but that in fact they rather take over the object that was already made three-dimensional by Nature; so that rotundity, thickness, or anything else of that kind does not belong to art, because heighth and breadth and all the qualities of solids already existed in the material, but all that belongs to the art are the lines that outline such a body, which are on the surface; therefore, as we said, the three-dimesional existence does not appertain to art but to Nature, and the same objection also applies when they speak of touch, because, as it has already been said, to find that an object is three-dimesional is not a result of art.

 

As one would hardly imagine, these lines have been written almost five hundred years ago in a letter the artist Agnolo Bronzino sent to the italian humanist, historian and poet Benedetto Varchi to underline the primacy of painting on sculpture. Couldn’t this above quote be a good approach to read some of the conflicts that Nick Darmstaedter deals with in his last show dedicated to the idea of “spam” at Bugada&Cargnel in Paris? For example, real vs. virtual, two-dimensional vs. three-dimensional, painted vs. printed, natural vs. artificial, uniqueness vs. multiplicity.

 

July 18, 2015