soneto nulo Painting

At first sight RONALDO GROSSMAN's paintings could take us back to concrete art and, through its merely apparent effects, to a certain lineage of op art. However, the questions guiding his work go well beyond the fashions and ethics of these historical references. Enlightened by science and technology, concrete art forms were deployed accordingly to the scientific laws put forth by gestalt theory, in accordance with a systematic program, a serial suit, most of the time conceived to symmetrically obey the unyielding rules of industrial mechanization. The artist was left with the sole task of being but the designer of shapes, the one who plans out a beholder friendly and instantaneous message by mastering the laws of geometry's vocabulary. The concretist artist, like most of modern tradition's constructivists, nurtured the dream of interfering in the social bedrock of the industrial world, working their way with their methods in order to finally stir the universe of shapes to the climax of sensitivity itself. Altogether, at the wheel of concretism lied a desire to follow the footsteps of industry's standardized serial production, to hail progressivism's ideals of technique, updating this plot into programmatic, predictable and rational forms. Op art on the other hand, also associated its image kinetics to mechanized movement, generating optical twists that relied solely on the "immediacy" of a merely formal dynamic illusionism, something like an easily reactive to stimuli hinge. Deterministic and objective to the extreme, optical art gave no leeway in its works for pointing out greater problems of perception, i.e. between-the-ground voids, gaps between space and image. Of course, we do not refer to talents like TINGUELY, LE PARC, SOTO, or CRUZ DIEZ, all of whom, by humor or sheer unpredictability, ventured deeper into creating paradoxes, even when manoeuvering at the edges of kinetic art. RONALDO GROSSMAN maintains a passionate relation with this historical past. Without endorsing concrete art's blunt formalism nor op art's ascetic mechanism, he partially updates its models, rather as an instrument than a simple game of mirrors, to rethink order as phenomenal space.