It’s with great pleasure that we present the elemental of our magazine.
We don’t practice philosophies. Elemental is constructed from the elements, it appropriates simplicity, from rudimental to fundamental and primitive, from laws of the creation of a system. From art principles and design. This edition, Elemental: from poetic to functional, emerges from the union of two graphic designers – Kurt Schwitters and Theo Van Doesburg – and from what relates them with the new design principles that start in Netherlands and Germany.
In Holland, Theo Van Doesburg created and led the De Stijl Movement with painter Piet Mondrian. Because he believed that art should reconcile the major life extremes – “Nature and intellects”, Van Doesburg wanted to reach the fusion of all disciplines and the synthesis of all forms of artistic expression in just one. He defended the pure abstraction and the universality, the reduction to the essential forms, colours and harmony, characteristics presented in magazines like De Stijl and Mécano.
In parallel, in Germany, we meet with some of Kurt Schwitters’s variable facets that relate themselves in a technical and chronologic way, just like the borders of the variable modalities and art movements that he practiced and transcended. With Bauhaus artist’s influences, Dadaists and constructivists, the bases for Merz’s creation were established, an aesthetic that will go along all his work, and Der Ring neue Werbegestalter, the group he started.
In this context, we back off to a time in which society values and exalts design to the diffusion of ideas and disclosure of information, through de publication of journals, magazines and posters to persuade the public. Is in this moment that we remember the reunion between constructivists like Lissitzky and Moholy-Nagy, and Dadaists like Arp, Tristan Tzara and Kurt Schwitters, in Weimar, promoted by Theo Van Doesburg with the purpose of crossing ideologies and establishing a union between the two movements. From poetic to functional. From Van Doesburg to Schwitters and from Schwitters to Van Doesburg, the receptivity, collaboration and influence, the exaltation of notions and disciplines of each other, allowed us to find new applications, new approaches and overlap of opposite philosophies with no apparent relation, new directions of thoughts expressed in the huge impact that graphic design had in the 20th century.
Elemental: from poetic to functional, emerges from a relation – started in a lyric way and ended in the modernist and functionalist ideologies – that breaks the boundaries between art and design, between Dada and De Stijl, between provocation and abstraction, to create a pure, universal, innovative and modernist aesthetic.
