Igor Kubalek: figurative painting against the hegemony of concept

In “Propos sur la démarche figurative en art actuel” (Remarks on the Figurative Approach in Today’s Art), Igor Kubalek explored the place of figuration in the contemporary art of the “Formidable Era”.

At the origin of this book was a manifesto by the artist and his friends and acquaintances (twelve in all, like the apostles), formulated in 2010 in Notre Discours (Our Discourse), as a reaction to the conceptualism of CA (Conceptual or Contemporary Art).

This “manifesto” was a revolt against an oppressive hegemony of non-painting in the visual arts at the time. The Discourse brought to a close a century of various manifestos defined by the particular features of the painter’s process (the first manifesto, that of the Futurists, dates from 1909). During the 1940s, with the transplantation of the Bauhaus protagonists to the USA, aesthetic concerns were observed to be abandoned in favour of the pure technicality of the process or of pure concept. The twentieth century shut itself away in the particularism of research that was either formal or philosophical (conceptual, fundamental), and it abandoned the primordial function of art, that is to say its function of synthesizing emotions and perceptions in communication with others. This text is the reflection of an artist and art lover, speaking in defence and promotion of figurative and perceptual art. The omertà imposed since 2010 on the Manifesto (Discourse), as on the essay (Propos) in 2020, bears witness to the contempt and democratic intolerance of today’s financial conceptualism, mixed with homophobia, Slavophobia, contempt for doctors and medicine, chauvinism and protectionism among its protagonists, who dismiss the authors as pretentious megalomaniacs and incompetents, and life drawing as an obscene or absurd form of voyeurism. Sic!