note: The late eighties were very productive years for Gerard: in order to accommodate the numbers of works we have divided this aspect of the gallery into several sections, of which this gallery is the Sculpture Gallery for "Red - Blue - Yellow Works". To view the "Painting Gallery" please click here". For the "Drawing Gallery please click here". To return to the "Red-Blue-Yellow Lobby please click here". To view all the "Works of the Eighties please click here".

Red - Blue - Yellow Works Sculptures

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Red Blue Wheelchair - Blueprint and Models		1986-87
"The failure of De Stijl is in its absence of curves." By applying this (Purist) criticism of Le Corbusier (Promenade Architecturale) literally to Neo-Plasticism, one should theoretically end up with the 'Ideal Pure Form'. Thus in praxis: by adding curves (i.e. wheels) to Rietveld's Orthogonal Neo-plasticist 'ideal' the 'Universal Pure Form' should be realized. Gerard Pas, 1987.
the reality is that the ideal pure form ironically points to our human condition: one of frailty

Red Blue Wheelchair	1987
no more - no less - pas plus - pas moins

Installations of Red Blue Wheelchair
LESS of more - more of LESS

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Work that predates or inform - Red Blue Crutches
- The Crutches to the left "Voor mij de Realitiet Schommelt" (For me Reality Sways) 1979. - The middle and middle right images are from the Installation "Hinc Illae Lacrimae" 1986. To view this entire installation "please click here". - Middle right : "Broadway Boogie Woogie" 1986, after Piet Mondriaan's painting of the same name. - Right :"Living Meridian Sculptures" To view this entire installation "please click here".
some work percolates its way up through the decades - ars est longa vita brevis - art is long, life is short -

Studies of - for - Red Blue Crutches
- Left : "Saturn, ruler of the boundaries of the planetary circle, is the god of the melancholy, the sick, the crippled and the creative." By Sebastian Münster, Organa Planetarum, Heidelberg, 1522. Courtesy of La Biblioteca Apostilica Vaticana, Rome, MS. Pal. lat. 1368, fol. 1V "I couldn't help but notice that the god of the depressed, sick and disabled is also the god of the creative. Sardonically, this is probably not far from the truth. How sublime that he also used a crutch and had a prosthetic leg." G. Pas - Middle: first study / watercolour painting which began the Red Blue series 1986. - Right : was created after Red Blue Crutches - Wheelchair : it conveys the roots of these works and is titled "Ontology of the Red Blue Crutch - A tale with an uneasy ending" 1988.
melancholic, sick, crippled and creative

Red Blue Crutches 1 - 12	1986-87
a vision of utopia

Red Blue Crutches - 3 - 6 - 11 - 12
"Throughout history, art has used nature as a crutch to convey its message to mankind. In the 20th century it threw away that crutch, it wanted to go on alone, without a crutch!" Theo Van Doesburg, Pensées sur l'Art Moderne, Eenheid, Aug. 8, 1914. "Why throw away a good tool if it works and if you need one?" G. Pas
is there pure form? from the applied form to the abstract form and visa-versa

Red Blue Crutches 1 - 12

can less be more when revealing the frailty of the human condition

Installations of Red Blue Crutches
PaS Plus - PaS Moins, The Walter Phillips Gallery - The Banff Centre for the Arts, Banff, Canada
every object has a particular relationship to space; it is an image of space

A Reinvented Object	1988-89
the tension between an ideal pure form and empirical reality can be more interesting

A Reinvented Object
- In the entrance of Mondrian's studio in Paris 1926, there was a round vase on a hallway table, which according to his biographer, Michel Seuphor, contained a single artificial tulip, its leaves painted white to remove the colour green which he had banished from his studio. - In almost all of the documentation of Gerrit Rietveld - Schröder Schräder House in Utrecht, NL, one never sees the ugly huge elevated expressway which runs right next to house. On the glass sound barriers of the expressway are painted birds. - This is Gerard's comment on the tension between any ideological pursuit of 'pure form' and paradox of reality. Ironically, Gerard used a living Bonsai tree in his sculpture: the Bonsai Tree being probably the most manipulated form used by humankind in nature next to clay. "The sentiment of art, like the religious sentiment, like scientific curiosity, is born of wonder; the man who wonders at nothing lives in a state of imbecility and stupidity. This state ceases when his spirit, disengaging itself from matter and from physical necessities, is struck by the phenomena of nature, and seeks their meaning; when he is impressed by something in them grand and mysterious, a concealed power which reveals itself". Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
the true ideal pure form considers all of reality

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© Gerard Pas