Resilience Art

Art Resilience is an artistic movement created in 2014, based in the Bateau-Lavoir, in Montmartre, Paris. France. Resilience is, originally, a term used in physics which characterizes the capacity of a material subjected to an impact to recover its initial state. It is the capacity to absorb the disturbances, to be changed, then to reorganize, to learn from the disturbance and to always keep the same basic structure, to always have the same identity. In art, resilience is the capacity of a work of art to preserve its particularity through aesthetics despite increasing subjectivization.

The Art Resilience movement was created in 2014 by Ksenia Milicevic, along with eight founding members, namely John Botica (New Zealand), Gregorio Cuartas (Colombia), Christelle Larson (France), Gérard Lartigue (Mexico), Victor Molev (Canada ), Miguel Betancourt (Ecuador), Senol Sak (Turkey) and Christopher Stone(England) in Paris, France. It is a group of artists for whom art is not the result of a random gesture, nor a merely dramatic form for the entertainment of the public. These are artists who are part of the contemporary, but with the objective based on aesthetics, thus maintaining the ability of art to link man with the world. The term “resilience” is used by Milicevic referring to a term originally used in physics to characterize the ability of an impact material to return to its original state and save its identity. Resilience is, in art, the ability of the work to preserve its characteristics through aesthetics, despite the strong subjectivity in contemporary art. The Art Resilience art movement is not formal in nature, it only seeks to redefine the notion of art.

Concept
When everything has become so fluid, only beauty is able to give man a point of reference and guarantee him a certain balance. By banishing the beauty from art, artists have submitted it to violence, vulgarity, ugliness, emptiness. And yet, for art to retain its ability to locate us in a space out of time, to abstract us from ourselves and to include us in a whole, creating in us the very experience of life, which is the first function of art, the beauty is difficult to dismiss. Beauty is immutable and constant.

Man, through his sensibility, perceives the beauty to which he adheres through intelligible since there is a connection between the structure of beauty, the human brain (as well as that of some animals, and we know nothing of plants), and the world.

The principle of constancy connects art and the universe. Art is both an abstract concept and a concrete reality. It is its mathematical form that gives it the character of perfection. As an abstract concept, it is immutable, but as a concrete reality, it unfold infinitely.

Beauty, through what is constant, immutable, through the perfect structure of a “mathematical theorem” calls to eternity.

The beauty that most powerfully connects man to the world and eternity is beauty in art. Art being the expression of the consciousness of existence, beauty is its very foundation.

Manifesto of Resilience Art
Definition of art is possible
Beauty is objective and it is the natural foundation of art.
Formal expression must be free, but based on the aesthetics that ensure quality.
The artist must be aware and responsible for his actions.
Art shapes the individual and the community.

Art of science
A quest for beauty has been a part of the tradition of physics throughout its history. And in this sense, general relativity is the culmination of a specific set of aesthetic concerns. Symmetry, harmony, a sense of unity and wholeness, these are some of the ideals general relativity formalises. Where quantum theory is a jumpy jazzy mash-up, general relativity is a stately waltz.

It may not be the duty of scientists to enchant our conceptual landscape, yet that is one of the goals science can achieve; and no scientific idea has been more enrapturing than Einstein’s. In essence the theory gives us a new understanding of gravity, one that is preternaturally strange. According to general relativity, planets and stars sit within, or withon, a kind of cosmic fabric – spacetime – which is often illustrated by an analogy to a trampoline.

Applying the concept of spacetime to the whole cosmos, and taking into account the gravitational affect of all the stars and galaxies within it, physicists can use Einstein’s equations to determine the structure of the universe itself. It gives us a blueprint of our cosmic architecture.

At a time when there is increasing desire to bridge the worlds of art and science, creative leaps here are driven both by playful speculation and by the ludic powers of logic. Reason and imagination combine to synthesise a whole that neither alone could achieve.

Factors of Resilience in Art
Art submitted to different conceptions of the world, squeezed by historicist theories, is reluctant to answer expectations with regards to the possibility of a perfect communication between citizens equal through a community of taste, submerged under the weight of the announcement of its approaching end, crushed under politics, reduced to the description of the social, torn apart by the requirements of the freedom of the artist, molded in all sorts of historically and geographically classified forms, melded into a whole by the theories on the fusion of art and life, underwent, throughout the decades, interpretations, manipulations, appropriations, to the point that we have forgotten the very existence of art works. They have become buried under all kinds of images and objects, when its very existence is not denied as historically exceeded or reduced to a simple element of communication between people. And yet…

From the premise that art is impossible to define (Kierkegaard) and the identification of beauty with simple subjective taste, art loses its specificity and any judgment on the quality of the work becomes impossible. The beautiful is considered obsolete and judgment on the quality of the work is replaced by other considerations such as novelty, message, action… these attributes can be a part of the work, but can in no way give it specificity. Gradually, the work itself eventually disappears.

Works of art were based on harmoniously ordered internal structures, on time by relating to the past, on the present by adjusting to their eras, and extended into the future by being founded on what is immutable, beauty. Thus, works of art acquires the shape of life, which gives to it is specificity, and which each new look reactivates to infinity. In such works, artists and viewers meet, and it is through them that man participates in and is part of the world.

The period during which a work inscribes itself is abolished, with artistic products becoming ephemeral. Through subjectivity, the production is only centered on the action of the artist, with the art object’s interest lying only in the signifying intention of the artists’ project. And yet, art is precisely that which has no intentionality.

The viewer is reduced to participating in the game, deciphering the discourse or going along to be distracted. The viewer remains outside of the work. Thus, in contemporary products of art, we witness the disappearance of the work of art, as these products are not based on any foundations and do not distinguish themselves in any way from any other object. Modern iconoclasm has triumphed. Being an iconoclast is to be against the world. Being against the world is to be against reason. It is to be against man.

Exhibitions
The first International Resilience Art Fair was organized in 2015 by Ksenia Milicevic at the Saint-Frajou Painting Museum, Saint-Frajou, France. 1st Prize: Anna Grazi, Corsica, France. 2nd Prize: Uros Paternu, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 3rd Prize: Irena Grant, Tasmania, Australia, Jury Prize: Yaffah Kanfitine, Lomé, Togo.
2016, 2nd International Resilience Art Fair. 1st Prize: Rosemary Meza-Desplas, Dallas, United States. 2nd Prize: Tanya Ziniewicz, Baltimore, United States, 3rd Prize: Melvyn Chuang, Taipei, Taiwan, Jury Prize: Mary Joyce, Edmonton, Canada.
Participation of Ksenia Milicevic in the Euro-Mediterranean Congress – Marseille: Resilience in the Living World, under the chairmanship of Boris Cyrulnik, May 19-21, 2016, Departmental Archives of Bouches du Rhône. Intervention on resilience in art.
2017, 3rd International Resilience Art Fair. Participating countries: Brazil, Indonesia, Canada, United States, Pakistan, Switzerland, England, Australia, South Africa, Tunisia, Turkey, France. 1st Prize: Mayanne Mackay, Toulouse, France, 2nd Prize: Mary Joyce, Edmonton, Canada, Museum Prize: Ipung Purnomo, Papua, Indonesia. Jury Prize: Olivier Talon, L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, France with the work “Winter Blues”, private collection.
2018, 4th International Resilience Art Fair. Participating countries: Argentina, Australia, Canada, United States, Indonesia, Israel, Puerto Rico, Turkey, France. 1st Prize: Mary Joyce, Canada. 2nd Prize: Ana Erra, Argentina. Jury Prize: Corinne Medina Saludo, France. Museum Prize: Allen Rush, United States.

In 2018, resilience in Art was presented at the 4th World Congress on Resilience organized by Resilio – International Association for the promotion and dissemination of research on resilience in partnership with Aix-Marseille University in Marseille (France), June 27-30, 2018.
In 2019 Michelle Marder Kamhi art critic, joined the Art Resilience movement.
2019, 5th International Resilience Art Fair. Participating countries: Canada, Indonesia, Iran, Egypt, France, Italy, Czech Republic, Switzerland, Turkey, United States. 1st Prize: Mahmoud El-Kouriny, Egypt. 2nd Prize: Hector Lopez, Switzerland. Jury Prize: Mary Nash, United States. Museum Prize: Samaneh Riazati, Iran. Photography Prize: Nicholas Luchenbill, United States.

Members and associates of Art Résilience
Corinne Medina-Saludo
Christopher stone
Gerard Lartigue
John Botica
Ksenia Milicevic
Michelle Marder Kamhi
Mary Joyce
Miguel Betancourt
Sandra Bromley
Senol Sak
Victor Molev