Curatorial notes
Curator: Let’s consider this mixed-media print from 1950 by Julius Bissier. It is entitled “Untitled.” Editor: It feels almost like a scattering of earth fragments. Or perhaps an abstracted aerial view of an archaeological dig. The earth tones are grounding, while the asymmetry gives a sense of disquiet. Curator: The geometric shapes certainly recall ancient foundations. Bissier, while working in abstraction, was deeply concerned with accessing a kind of primordial consciousness. Consider the cultural and psychological implications here; the layering of materials suggests palimpsest of history and memory. The absence of figures places emphasis on structure itself as a form of identity. Editor: And the use of seemingly random colours in relation to each shape. Look at how some shapes evoke natural stones, other textiles, all laid on a surface not revealed as flat, but a world to be read. Are they supposed to form a language, maybe the building blocks of it? Perhaps Bissier draws inspiration from calligraphy and the way lines interact with blank space. We see an engagement with the history of mark-making, each color like a stroke representing some coded thought. Curator: Precisely. Furthermore, Bissier was creating this work amidst the reconstruction era, laden with its own erasures and repressions of memory, of truth-telling. Could we perceive the shapes, divorced from any contextualizing ground, as an exploration of diasporic scattering, both psychic and literal? Editor: That interpretation adds a compelling dimension to the piece. It allows the viewer to place this small map into different landscapes across our contemporary social experience, as both personal and collective memory. We are invited to fill the blanks based on what we recognize in those shapes, what cultures they trigger, what geographies we can ascribe. Curator: Thank you for bringing such illuminating insights. By recognizing the political context of that postwar era, it encourages us to interpret art, even abstraction, in terms of identity formation, political and geographic dislocation, and the inherent meaning embedded in structures themselves. Editor: Bissier’s artistic vocabulary prompts each viewer to bring a cultural, visual encyclopedia, to explore how the world connects—as fragments of a bigger picture—through symbolic associations and memory.