The topic of “the unit and the whole” also interested Vera Molnar’s husband, François Molnar, whose essay was published with the same title in 1966, in a volume edited by György Kepes, titled Module, Proportion, Symmetry, Rhythm (George Baziller, New York). From the beginning of her career, Vera Molnar’s work was in accordance with her husband’s scientific work, who supplemented his writings on art and his research – dealing with the psychology of perception – with philosophical, linguistic, semiotic, mathematical and geometric aspects. The author of Vera Molnar’s monograph, Vincent Baby used Ludwig Wittgenstein quotes several times as mottos to his texts. Wittgenstein’s work titled Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, originally published in 1921, can mark the field of logic as a possible intersection of Vera Molnar’s works based on mathematical systems and the linguistic theories more and more commonly known and used since the 1960s.
“The facts in logical space are the world. (…) It is clear that however different from the real one an imagined world may be, it must have something – a form – in common with the real world. (…) We make to ourselves pictures of facts. (…) The picture consists in the fact that its elements are combined with one another in a definite way. (…) The picture depicts reality by representing a possibility of the existence and non-existence of atomic facts. (…) And if we penetrate to the essence of this pictorial nature we see that this is not disturbed by apparent irregularities. (…) For these irregularities also picture what they are to express; only in another way. (…) How can the all-embracing logic which mirrors the world use such special catches and manipulations? Only because all these are connected into an infinitely fine network, to the great mirror. (…) I am my world. (The microcosm.) – wrote Wittgenstein in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. „The whole thing is a process, it goes back and forth until something comes out of it. The computer makes its suggestions, which are logical ones because they obey the algorithms, the rules. From that I choose the ones I think are the most beautiful, the best and most intelligent.” – stated Vera Molnar, whose world is divided into lines and forms enclosed by lines. According to Wittgenstein, atomic facts are combinations of objects, and Vera Molnar renders these combinations, transforming the elements step by step. Wittgenstein suggests that to know an object, knowing all the possibilities of its occurrence in atomic facts is a must, and along this, Vera Molnar’s artistic practice can be described as a research on objects – a research focusing on the possibilities of the line’s occurrence in atomic facts, which lies in the nature of the line itself. “A proposition can only say how a thing is, not what it is.” – stated Wittgenstein, and nor does Vera Molnar seek to find the ultimate definition of the line. Rather she uses the “irregularities” described by the Austrian philosopher, consciously employing “order” and “disorder” to repeatedly examine what a line might be like, expressing her thoughts perceptibly through the senses. Is it a line? – could we also ask ourselves when looking at Molnar’s work. It’s a complex question where there’s never just an only answer but rather a conglomeration of answers. As Vera Molnar might responds: “Une ligne, comme un curriculum vitae, à l’image de l’ensemble des mes activités passées: somme de ma vie.”
Translating as: “One line, like a curriculum vitae, picturing all of my past activities: the sum of my life.” In addition to the consistent application of rules and organizing principles, Vera Molnar’s work often bears personal aspects, demonstrating how the world can be reflected in a single line for her. Her series on view titled Mikrokosmos (1978), consisting of ten silkscreen prints, can be considered depiction of interactions between the individual person and the world, the microcosm and the macrocosm. Molnar’s exhibited work created with a plotter, titled Tablottin 1-4 (1979), can be also linked to the immediate environment of man, because it’s based on an everyday object, a telephone book. When creating the series, Molnar appointed ten dots in two columns that marked numbers from zero to nine, then connected them following seven-digit phone numbers. She repeated this process several times, allocating multiple phone numbers on one page. Through the four pieces, she reduced the distance between the columns on each sheet according to a defined ratio system, increasingly crowding the lines. The ten-part collage series titled Le Montparnasse d’après Klee (2005) as well has a personal, but also universal dimension through the motif of the Parnassus. The starting point of Molnar’s work was Paul Klee’s Ad Parnassum (1932), in the collection of Kunstmuseum Bern. Accordingly, in an interview with Júlia Cserba from 2019, Molnar stated: “Recently, someone gave me a Klee reproduction which stroke my fancy so much that I pasted it into my notebook. Just have a look at where I went from there. Quite a simple pattern: this is my world.”
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