Vera Molnár — (Dés)ordres

1974

Artists: Vera Molnár · Year: 1974 · Medium: Plotter drawings; ongoing series · Substrate: FORTRAN on CNRS mainframe; Benson plotter; later personal computers and printers · Place: Paris, France · Institution: CNRS — Centre de calcul Blaise Pascal (Dés)ordres is Vera Molnár's second major plotter series, begun in 1974 and revisited for decades. The series takes as its subject the grid of nested squares — concentric frames each inscribed inside the next — and progressively introduces disorder into the grid across the course of a single composition. Early rows remain regular. Later rows show the squares shifted, tilted, partially destroyed, with the disorder scaled to a parameter that varies across the sheet. Each print is a different tuning of that parameter. If Interruptions (1968) argued that order and disorder coexist at localized boundaries, (Dés)ordres argues that they exist on a continuous gradient that a composition can traverse. The title is a deliberate graphic pun — the parenthetical Dés makes the word simultaneously orders and disorders, the one contained inside the other. Molnár was a careful reader of Perec and the Oulipo; the title is their kind of move. The series is widely cited as canonical, included in nearly every museum retrospective of Molnár's work, and is structurally the bridge between her early strict-constraint machine imaginaire works and her later looser color plotter works of the 1980s and 1990s. She continued making (Dés)ordres-derived prints into her nineties; the Centre Pompidou holds the most complete institutional set. Molnár died in Paris on December 7, 2023, aged ninety-nine. She continued to make work, by hand and by plotter, until her final months. Lore The parenthetical title was suggested to Molnár by her husband, a theorist of visual perception who collaborated with her on the psychophysical framework that underpinned much of her work. Molnár continued running variations of the (Dés)ordres algorithm on modern printers through the 2010s and 2020s, often collaborating with younger generative artists who rebuilt her algorithms on contemporary tools. In 2022 she released a limited-edition NFT collection of digital (Dés)ordres, making her, at ninety-eight, one of the oldest artists to have released work on Ethereum. Sources • Centre Pompidou collection — Vera Molnár • Molnár, Vera — Inventaire (catalogue raisonné, 2018) • DAM Projects / Wolf Lieser — Molnár monograph