-12° 1956

Curator: Up next we have Alfred Manessier’s, “-12°”, painted in 1956. Editor: A winter chill, almost sepulchral! My immediate sense is of frozen machinery, perhaps from a play. Though I suspect the truth may be far from gears and gadgets. Curator: Perhaps not far off; there’s a geometric architecture in the acrylic, almost as if a city planner has had a hand in shaping these blocks of colour. The cool greys set a mood that only those stark yellow geometric forms can disrupt. You see here Manessier as an exemplar of Art Informel. Editor: I like how you read that icy atmosphere! Manessier has broken these pigments down to building blocks in the painting and, by extension, has invited us to consider the material reality that underscores any kind of painterly experience. I can practically see the hands making this, can't you? The mixing of paint, the loading of the brush... Curator: The materiality and the manual labor. Precisely. There’s a tactile sensation as well, imagining those careful, decisive brushstrokes shaping these frozen shapes. Almost, alchemic…but what’s been alchemized is a new emotional register that brings to mind modern isolation. Editor: You’ve nudged something open in me; I see it now! Manessier gives us not just abstraction but emotion through materiality—the feel of that ground, the application of the acrylic itself. It takes effort to feel this! But look how, by naming it -12°, he invites you to imagine what labor is performed in cold and who must persevere through isolating work days in those conditions! Curator: Ah, a sudden shift of feeling, a new register opening within my own body now as well. What begins as formal rigor—acrylic planes meeting the gaze— becomes imbued with, if I dare suggest, feeling, connection, pathos... The experience feels communal after all. Editor: That’s the power of focusing on material realities. From these base, physical layers and through these means, feeling itself crystallizes!