Vera Molnar, who had lived in France since 1947, was a pioneer of computer art, one of the founders of the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (GRAV) in 1960. From 1959, she began to create combinatorial images and to model mathematical laws using what she called the “machine imaginaire”, and very early on, in 1968, she had the opportunity to replace the imaginary machine with a “machine réelle”, i.e. a real computer. In her work, the algorithmic randomness of the computer, the line (“A line is like a biography in which all my past activities are mapped: a summary of my life.”), and the link between order and disorder, structure and freedom, play a key role. Molnar’s 1990 work reflects on the blackened, salt-worn piles of the ditch protecting the medieval castle on the Grand Plage du Sillon, a sandy beach in the north of Brittany, near the town of Saint Malo – a sign that the artist’s abstract, geometric motifs are inspired by (the) reality (of art). This work is also special because it is not a computer graphic, but a drawing made by the artist herself, in which the vertical stripes are arranged in a delicate rhythm, wavering on the border between order and disorder, and the strips that break the “unity” of the stripes, shifting, pressing on (into) each other, thus connecting them.
Kriszta Dékei