Prìere Eclair de Soir
Marcel Janco
MARCEL JANCO, 1918. PLASTER RELIEF.
As one of the founders of Dada, alongside a group of 5 other artists living in Zurich during the first world war, Janco had abilities of creation that had not yet been invented. Joined by his brothers from their native Romania, he upturned the European consciousness with works of absurdism and chaos, fighting against a logic of rationality that seemed to imprison the youth in a life that hardly felt living. Yet, not 4 years after the founding of the group, Janco and his co-founder Hans Arp abandoned the movement to spread the word of Constructivism across Eastern Europe. In doing so he traded a rejection of the institutional ways of thinking that were still impacting contemporary life to a total embrace of hyper-modernity, and a way of creating that was not meant to be in rebellion to but in reflection of the modern age. This plaster relief was made only a few months before this dissent, and the constructivist influence is already clear, with sharp angular lines that pierce and aspire to perfection, but the Dada is in him too with a composition that warps perspective and ignores the laws of nature.