MorTon

If there is one thing that links visual artist Ton van Os with composer Morton Feldman, then that would surely be frugality. The word may initially sound negative, but I personally believe that frugality is the finest quality that an artist can possess. No wasting materials, no needlessly complex accumulation of things, not suffocating the viewer or listener in a smokescreen of information or expression; but instead being thrifty, making something intangible using simple means, something that does not impose itself but which becomes a part of you, like a good friend becomes a part of you, like you become a part of the landscape through which you walk.

The best artists are frugal, yet they give the most.

In 2003, while working as a journalist with newspaper Trouw , I read a report about a forthcoming exhibition To Morton Feldman with work by Ton van Os. The visual material that Van Os sent in response to a telephone interview I had with him, lay smouldering on my desk for a year. Never before had I seen an artist who has found a perfect visual equivalent to the music of Morton Feldman - a composer who, in turn, was influenced by the working methods of the leading abstract painters of his day and immediate environment.

At that time, I already found Ton van Os's paintings in the homage to Morton Feldman series to possess a rare beauty. And in the course of the intervening years, in which Ton and I have become good friends, my admiration for his work has only increased.

I recently read somewhere that there are two types of artist: the first group wishes to produce Grand Works with which to encompass and change the entire world. But there are also those who remain their whole life grazing on a small piece of land, which they map out meticulously (again that frugality): it goes without saying that Feldman and Os belong to this latter group of artists. At the time I write this, the number of paintings in the Feldman series is somewhere in the eighties. The end is still nowhere in sight, every new painting brings a new surprise.

Van Os has succeeded in transferring the essential in Feldman's music onto canvas. By this I don't mean that the paintings form the visual subtitles to Feldman's sounds. In that regard Van Os's paintings are sovereign. Placed in a space outside the musical time, each work in the series appears to be an x-ray of Feldman's world. They are paintings in which paradoxical themes are discussed such as dynamic stasis, chaotic order, unpredictable repetition, intuitive austerity and ringing silence.

The first thing that struck me was the deceptive simplicity of Van Os's language, because the artist depicts nothing other than what he himself calls ‘dots': circles that seem to have a skin and a specific gravity, which appear to move on the canvas. The canvas, in turn, never offers a uniform background, but is always space and a playing field for the protagonists, the dots.

The simplicity is deceptive insofar that Van Os does everything by eye (just as Feldman wrote his music by ear), meticulous and conscientious: no previously generated mechanisms, but primarily waiting and watching. To see where the next dot needs to go, the size, the specific gravity, the incidence of light, the clarity, the transparency and the direction of movement. I imagine that this is how Feldman composed and orchestrated.

With that, the work of Van Os has almost become temporal art - these are paintings you can hear, just as, conversely, you can often feel the skin of Feldman's music. Congealed music, frozen time.

Anthony Fiumara

Amsterdam, 24 October 2008