Avant-Garde Procedural Art Week 1: The role of chance in Gherasim Luca's Cubomanies

Gherasim Luca, Experiment With a Squared Stick Above Two Glasses, 1944

Gherasim Luca, untitled cubomania, 1945

Cubomania is the automatist technique of dividing a picture into small squares and then randomly rearranging them in a grid structure. Gherasim Luca, a Surrealist artist and poet, was the originator of the technique. He was born in Bucharest in 1913, but left for France after World War II to escape antisemitism. (He spent the rest of his life in Paris, finally committing suicide in 1991.) Cubomania came into being around 1944. The fascist Romanian regime had just ended, and Luca had to work as a street cleaner, scrubbing away the remains of the war. It is in this context that Luca proclaimed that “everything must be reinvented, nothing exists anymore,” seeking to deconstruct the visual image through his cubomania works.

Cubomania is influenced by earlier Surrealist collage of artists such as Max Ernst but departs from it. It does not remix the world into a new narrative; rather, it breaks away from any requirements of visual regularity. Cubomania follows a “pure” process that does not concern itself with what is being depicted in the source material. Luca’s considered his method to be scientific and objective, as he describes in detail in Dialectique de la Dialectique, a statement he co-authored with Dolfi Trost:

“We have returned to the problem of knowledge through images… by establishing a clear distinction between images produced by artistic means and images resulting from rigorously applied scientific procedures, such as the operation of chance or of automatism.”

References

[1] Krzysztof Fijalkowski, “Cubomania: Gherasim Luca and Non-Oedipal Collage” (2015)

[2] Dialectique de la dialectique on Wikipedia