’If you ask no questions, you cannot receive answers’

The exhibition ’Line – The Feeling of One Dimension’ does ask questions.

It inquires whether it is possible to join ’the line’, the most elemental and abstract instrument of art and ’the one dimension’ as scientific fundamentals, by means of the mental, poetic and artistic freedom of ’sense’, an unidentifiable concept.

According to its concept, the exhibition attempts to cross the border between ’nothing’ and one dimension, as well as between ’everything’ and one dimension, thus going beyond the simple use of the line. In this case the line is not the instrument of circumscribing a flat shape or making the illusion of space, etc. on the way between one dimension and the other dimensions; it is a goal – the goal of seeing how the artists approach one dimension from the zero point or infinite dimensional world by the means of geometric art.

The exhibition is part of the stream of thoughts that for decades has regularly dealt with analysing the similarities and differences of scientific and artistic cognition, of creation and practice.

Several artistic trends appearing since the 1910s and having an impact even today are based on geometry.

The exhibition series, created as the sequel of the supreMADIsm festival and symmetry conference (Moscow 2006), nests in geometric art spanning the period from Russian constructivism to our days, thus emphasising that geometric art (as a collective term) has an unbroken continuity from its appearance to the present.

Straight lines running towards infinity symbolise the dynamism in art’s development, its unended history, the incompleteness of the process. The aim of the exhibititon is to show the versatility and wide variety of the representations produced in the above mentioned development process through the works of art of the artists invited to the event, to show that the works of art made in plane and space can express and generate the feeling of ’one dimension’, the feeling of focusing.

Even the social movements of the second half of the twentieth century were affected by the feeling of ’being one dimensional’.

Philosopher and political activist Herbert Marcuse won world fame with his theory in the 1960s. He directed criticism at one-dimensional societies, contemporary capitalist and state socialist regimes. The concept of the Great Refusal cemented his reputation as theoretician of liberation from affluent society.

Slovak artist Marian Drugda joined one-dimensional social criticism with a barcode picture having a Bauhaus reference. A barcode is a means of identification consisting of monochrome, multicoloured or invisible lines (bars) and spacings of different widths. Its encoded binary image and text content can be read and decoded with a suitable instrument. In Hungary the one dimensional bar code with a data storing capacity of several hundred characters appeared at the end of the 1980s.  Today even the simplest item has a barcode on it and our everyday life is infiltrated with barcodes.

Some say it is not the number of dimensions that qualifies the meaning of our existence, since one cannot have more than three, but how far you can get within the given framework. Now let us see within what framework the chosen artists have worked and how far they have come.