EDUCATIONAL BOOKLET | 01 ‘STIPO PRANYKO’TEA Tenerife Espacio de las ArtesDepartamento de Educación

What are Pranyko’s works made of? What materials does he use?

In order to create his works, Pranyko uses materials which have been thrown away by others, such as bits of wood, pieces of cloth, scraps of paper and old cartons. For the artist, these ‘poor’ materials are much richer in meaning and contain a greater symbolic charge than something that has just left the factory. They are materials that, in their deterioration, contain the stories of the hands through which they have passed and of the places where they have been used.

On the other hand, Pranyko incorporates the objects he finds by chance, which serve as an excuse for starting new creative processes and turns them into the leading elements of his work. Each object contains one or several stories that the artist uses to establish a connection with his personal history or with the collective past of the community.

Feathers, rice, salt, bone… are also materials for creativity in the hands of Pranyko. In each case they are elements selected for their symbolic and evocative power. Rice is the food of the poor, as well as a cereal which symbolises toil on the land and which, therefore, evokes a philosophy of life which Pranyko yearns for. Salt evokes the memory of the Lanzarote salt pans and, therefore, also represents a particular way of understanding the world. Feathers suggest lightness, the airy as opposed to the ponderous but they are also the feathers of the Phoenix, capable of being reborn from their ashes

Vitae absurdae/Opera absurda, 1983 Mixed media, 94 x 130 cm

The use of all these materials and objects of a humble appearance and use makes it possible to connect Pranyko’s work with the aesthetics of Italian Arte Povera. However, although there are many coincidences, the truth is that the influence of this movement on the work of the Bosnian artist is not direct. Pranyko lived in Italy for a time, close to Milan, but he left the country before Arte Povera emerged in Turin in 1967. Nevertheless, years before, he had shared experiences with artists who are nowadays considered to be the direct precursors of it, such as Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni, in many of whose works the characteristics which would define this artistic current a few years later could already be guessed at.

The militants of Arte Povera gave an extremely high value to both the creative process – understood as the process of fabrication and manipulation of the material – like the materials incorporated into the works in their rawest and most primitive state. The movement arose as a reaction, on the one hand, against the predominance of industrial and perfectly finished materials used by the proponents of Minimal Art and, on the other, against the art system and its exacerbated mercantilism. The artists undermined the conventions about the painting and paint which had dominated until then, they added life to artistic expression and gloated about taste and the exaltation of banality. Although his style did not arise with a direct link to Povera, Pranyko shared with his militants, apart from the manner and the use of this kind of ‘poor’ materials, his anti-mercantilist conception of creation, separately from the dictates of the market and of the industry.

Why is Pranyko’s work often linked with Arte Povera?

A broken spoon (Cuadro con cuchara, 2003) mended so as to be able to be used again is important and contains a way of understanding the world. A sieve (De los días de Canarias, 2001) speaks to us of the patience which impregnated the way of life of the ancient inhabitants of the island, which Pranyko so much grieves for. The brass plate of an insurance company (Fénix alemán, 2003) broken and reconstructed, refers us back to the break-up and subsequent reunification of the two Germanys. all the materials, however ordinary and vulnerable they may be – despite their nature as waste or perhaps precisely because they have been despised – are capable of being recovered and becoming the leading elements of a creative process and, therefore, transmitters of meaning too.

Cuadro con cuchara, 2003 Mixed media, 93 x 92 x 3 cm

In what contexts did Pranyko’s language develop?

THE POST-WAR ExISTENTIALIST INFORMALISM

Starting from the moment he began working, in the nineteen-fifties, Pranyko passed through different creative stages until he reached, at the end of the seventies, a language of his own, which is personal and at the margin, in which experimentation is a sine qua non. His artistic career began in his own country with figurative painting but, after coming into contact with the informalism which dominated the European context at that time, his figurative style progressively became abstraction.

Informalism was a broad movement which arose in Europe after the Second World War and which took in a number of artistic tendencies characterised by abstract language and the particular use that its representatives made of the materials. These, just like the techniques used, were employed as vehicles to transmit the personality of the artist. Chance, improvisation and rejection of premeditated construction also characterised all the variants (Concrete Art, Spatialism…) grouped under an artistic current which was not at all homogeneous and conceptually linked to existentialist philosophy.

Fénix Alemán, 2003 Mixed media, 302 x 211 cm

In reality, this post-war context was the result of the existentialist crisis from which European society was suffering after the Second World War. If the philosophical response to the injustice of war was Sartre’s existentialism, in the artistic sphere it was informalist painting. The drip painting, the impasto, the tearing of the canvas itself and the tortured shapes became the plastic translation of the dominant disillusion, confusion and desperation. Painters in this way denounced the way of painting – figurative and in oils – associated with an irrational world and society which had led Humanity to its own destruction. In this way, figurative art was abandoned (some would only recover it in order to fiercely subject it to torture, such as Bacon and Giacometti) together with the conventional techniques for searching for refuge in what is diametrically opposed.

THE MILANESE CONFUSION. FONTANA AND MANZONI.

In 1962, Pranyko went to Italy and there came into contact with the effervescent Milanese artistic atmosphere and some of its more outstanding representatives, such as Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni, who would have a determining influence on his work.

Lucio Fontana was an Italian-Argentinean artist who had a few years earlier founded the Spatialist Movement (one of the artistic trends of Informalism) one of whose main interests consisted of showing the three-dimensional nature of the canvas. The spatialists did not paint on the cloth but created on it constructions with the purpose that the viewer should perceive its three-dimensionality. Thus, Fontana’s most famous works were his canvases stabbed or ripped with a razor blade or with a cutter, monochromatic paintings in which the incisions aimed to suggest the depth of the bi-dimensionality of the cloth.

For his part, Piero Manzoni was another artistic revolutionary with whom Pranyko was in contact during his stay in Italy. His radical and extremist ideas on the concept and practice of art exercised a great influence subsequently on the configuration of the mature language of Pranyko. One year before his arrival in Milan, Manzoni had produced his Artist’s Shit (ninety cans of thirty grams of unadulterated excrement). In reality, this was only one of the numerous actions and works which Manzoni carried out during his brief artistic career. In all of them, he attacked artistic institutions and the art market, while at the same time he mocked both openly. The exercise without limits of this creative freedom would be what Pranyko would adopt for himself years later. Before, his confusion with the art market and its institutions would lead him to a creative parenthesis of an entire decade (1965–1975).

In the wake of a profound personal crisis, Pranyko reached his creative maturity at the end of the nineteen-seventies after carrying out the cathartic destruction of some of his previous work. He then became an artist on the edge who was not subject to the dictates of the art market due to the fact that he had not been accepted within it, allowing him to create with absolute freedom. It is this freedom which, beyond the contextual influences and possible relationships, is present in each and every one of the works on display.

How does Pranyko work?

Pranyko has declared on a number of occasions that “the artist has the duty to experiment”. Together with experimentation, spontaneity and freedom are the unarguable premises of his work, in which he also values the process above the final result. Pranyko finds, collects, recycles, reuses, sticks, links, cuts out, wraps up, pastes, re-pastes and re-covers. His works allow one to glimpse all those stages of the creative process; they are ‘transparent’ works which reveal their construction and the successive phases of their build-up. He is also interested in the stamp that the passage of time leaves on them, such as the stains from damp or rust, which he incorporates as one more element in his compositions. This taste for the transparency of the process, for its division into successive and superimposed stages and for construction from super-imposition, finds in the technique of collage its best ally. Collage brings together the diversity and responds perfectly to the logic of fragmentation, which is so much in vogue in the contemporary world in which we all perceive Pranyko creating in the same way: in a fragmented and super-imposed manner, in pieces, by stages, by specific, successive and counterposed stimuli.

Construcción – deconstrucción I, 2012Mixed media

What are Pranyko’s areas of interest?

Apart from the ‘poor materials’ and the everyday, humble objects, Pranyko has interested himself in a number of recurrent subjects in all his creative career:

Architectural space. In many works, the artist makes an effort to establish and highlight the relationship between the work and the architectural space in which it is located. It is as if, paradoxically, he wished to break up the bi-dimensionality of the works by making it more obvious. Thus, a ladder appears to invite us to penetrate a flat painting without any depth. In another work (…), an abstract element such as a tangent also serves to create a new space outside the painting but which in turn forms part of it.

The capacity for self-transformation of his works. Many of Pranyko’s works are modular; they are made up of modules which are capable of being exchanged one for another, of being extracted and relocated to create infinite possibilities from a series of archetypical shapes. This quality gives his works a spontaneity which, apart from bringing the work closer to the viewer, invites him to transform it and, therefore, to enter into the game of its creation.

Whiteness. Pranyko does without colour and subordinates the entire chromatic spectrum to a kind of white idealism with which he not only creates his works but with which he also dresses himself or paints his house. White floods dhis work, but also his life and his person; it is the sum of all the colours of the spectrum (“… colour is only a fragment of light, of the totality, it is for this reason that I do not work with colours”, he says). On the other hand, white bears a powerful symbolic charge associated with concepts such as the origin, purity, the vacuum or nothingness. In Pranyko’s work, apart from with those universal concepts white is also related with the colour of the sheets in which Islamic custom envelops its dead before taking them to their tombs, with the traditional suits of the Catholic peasants in his birthplace and with the whitewashed walls of Bosnian traditional architecture.

Nothingness. “Nothingness is larger than the whole” is one of Pranyko’s most repeated statements when explaining the enormous interest which this philosophic concept awoke in him during his career. The object of study by philosophers throughout the ages, nothingness is made real by Pranyko, who turns it into something, a thing, when he makes it the subject and the leading element of many of his works.

The presentative drawing. Beyond any trace of figurative representation, Pranyko rebels and claims the interest of the viewer about the drawing in itself. The drawing – he says – does not need to show anything other than the graphic art of which it is made up. The obsession with finding recognisable figures in a drawing must be replaced – he warns – by the re-creation in its abstract form or, as he calls it, its presentative form.

The play of contrast. Many of Pranyko’s works are made up from the contrast between opposites. As an expression of the oriental concept of the ying and the yang, in his paintings and installations he counterposes the natural and the artificial, the light and the heavy, the human and the divine, the conceptual and the formal, the intellectual and the sensible. These dualities flood his universe in what appears to be a constant search for an equilibrium that is as sought after as it is difficult to conserve.

Les baguettes, 1977 Mixed media, 105 x 130 x 10 cm

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