Roger Vilder

The kinetic objects of Roger Vilder are the synthesis of the geometrical order and the organic mutation, but they go far beyond. It is an innovative understanding of the morphological processes that his art proposes to us and not an umpteenth innovation of form in art. Who is Vilder: a Canadian artist of Lebanese origin, who until '71 works in Montreal, and who has since traveled and exhibited throughout Europe. We discover his work at the most important crossroads of the formal field of art.
Vilder, heir of constructivist resolutions, develops them in their formal manifestation - geometric language plus movement - in order to recompose the dichotomy between geometrical form and organic form. It is true that modern art has been extensively and severely divided as to the choice of one or the other form.
But these choices have always invested a deeper problem, that of the relations between art and life, between the autonomy of the specific means of painting and the reference data of reality. In order not to continue this illusory choice, we are currently working on a possible third path that is neither the geometrical nor the organic form, research in which minimal sculpture, land art, process art have been launched.
Vilder tells us not a third way, but the need to immerse ourselves in the metamorphoses of this 3rd infinity which is the organization of the matter of which we are made. After exploring the infinity of stars, interplanetary space, after exploring the molecular infinity, the vision of the genetic and vital dimension. Vilder's works until the 1970s featured expansions and contractions of elastic forms by visible mechanical processes, so that geometry is more the pattern of a code of learning from reality than true artistic language.
This artistic language, which is also neoplastic with works animated from '71 to the present day, where the intersection and divergence of lines (up to disappear at sight), straight lines, orthogonal, luminescent, etc. in fact a network of observation of the movement. Space is that of the painting in appearance, but the elementary mutation of forms comes from the association of the geometrical and the organic. If Mondrian is the geometrical abstraction of a tree, then Vilder is the optical restitution of the vital pulse of that same tree. It is interesting to recall the experiments conducted by Vilder in Montreal with the computer graphic.
On the basis of some works he mixed 2 programs of visual patterns to study the formation of lines that become squares. The new era of software ware opens unimaginable horizons to the problems raised by Vilder. The most direct solution - he says - is provided by the use of cinema and its temporality. Here he is a screenwriter of an experimental film on "movement and relationship between unity and the whole" where a perfect square, molecular organization of small points, transforms into an organic form of amoeba, becoming a flock of birds flying in the sky, into a school of fish in the sea and a flock of sheep running on the ground taking us on a journey in the air, the water and on earth, and finally getting back to the original square made of dots.
The transformations of the geometric image to the organic one require an animation technique that the computer can provide. The present tributes to constructivism are proof that the work of Vilder is the coherent extension of a research which has become classical and which can be recognized as a scientific legitimacy. However, these works also contain a principle of negation or even self-destruction, depending on the structure of each biomorphic organization of matter. What compensates in terms of aesthetic verification the apparent degree of mechanization and programming of the work.