I

Simplicity and complexity – with an opposition formulated in this manner, it is probably difficult to find a discipline as fortunate as the visual arts. It seems that by applying a universal pattern of evolution from simple forms to ever more complex ones onto the chronology of our artistic operations, we would receive a precise model of its historical development across all schools. Fully realistic visualizations come after the strict simplicity of symbolic pictograms, the flourishing Corinthian style comes after the ascetic Doric style, the fragmented Gothic style comes after the cohesive Romanism, and after the classicism of Renaissance – comes the elaborate Baroque. However, after complex analytical Cubism comes simple synthetic Cubism.

That last example shows that the dialectic of simple–complex sets up the primeval axis of struggles pertaining to aesthetic preferences; it cannot entirely be regarded as a vector programming their development. The periods in which the exquisite, elaborate, and structurally fragmented forms reigned are often only an introduction to reaching for extreme simplicity; they mobilize bold reductions. Contrary to what might be inferred from Darwinist theory, complexity in the visual arts is not dialectically privileged, and in particular the art of the 20th century facilitates multiple examples that prove otherwise.

The persistence of modernist concepts, which explicitly favors primitivism, or the enduring suspicion of the historians towards an elaborate yet eclectic (complex) post-modernism, suggests that the interdependency of both categories is more ambiguous. In the artistic practice of particular authors, it happens that they are equivalent sources and they become not the aim of the activity but one of its tools. The universal mechanism of the alternation of simplicity with complexity and vice versa descends in this way from the level of historical necessity and indicates directions of stylistic ideology to the level of individual choices.

What determines these choices? Is simplification an effect of the natural limitations of human imagination, unable to fully see the potential of the diversity of forms? Or maybe complexity is only a momentary victory of greediness, a vaccination reinforcing noble discretion? It turns out that contrary to intuitive preferences, which locate an admirable executive difficulty in respect, the aesthetics with intellectual sophistication rather join simplicity, whereas complexity is more often tied to emotional immoderation: ostentation, sensual insatiability, extravagance and splendor. Following the slogan “less is more”, what is complex is actually unripe, and reduction would be a peak stage of development. Its cumulativeness would consist of the rise of awareness of what should be rejected and not what should be added.

To substantiate these beliefs, the discovery of the “judging power” was undoubtedly important. The remarkably intricate art of Mannerism, which Immanuel Kant viewed as highly susceptible to sensual temptations, was a directly criticised due to that particular excess of form. The judging power crowning the entire cognitive will, provides the aesthetic judgment with transcendental grounds. Kant’s aesthetics aiming at putting sensual experience in brackets and turning art into an object for purely mental reflection, put sensually tempting things in contradiction with sophisticated restraint. However, does allure always have to refuse access to speculation and should intellectual attractiveness be compensated with sensual bareness?

One of the biggest dangers of simplicity is that for the good of the totality, it ignores details that do not fit – it cuts off uneven edges, omits places in which separate sets overlap, losing its expressiveness due to the irregularity of borders. It is an action focused on the ordering experience, basically intellectual and yet idealistic. Just like the division of all artistic schools into those that pertain to the senses and those that appeal to the intellect seems to be orderly but is at the same time arbitrary.

When Duchamp was elevating Conceptualism, he placed both of these areas in distinct opposition having had the many centuries of traditional Platonism behind him. It minimized the importance of senses to the benefit of the intellect, and dualism sanctified with academic theory: paint stroke – line and intuition – speculation. Those were expressed by the rivalry of painterly Venice with the sketching of Florence, the fleshy “Rubensists” with rational “Poussenists” or reflective geometrical abstraction with unbridled taschisme.

The visual richness and mimetics refer easily only to the senses whereas we regard the lucid Classicism and aesthetic Minimalism as intellectual, however, the complexity of exalted Mannerism or the richness of the persuasive Baroque essentially relied on a sophisticated aesthetic theory which was the effect of the dynamic development of optics, Cartesianism and high self-awareness as well as relativism (Stoichita, 1997).

One of the gratest dangers of complexity lies in its ability to discernsubsequent nuances, multiply countless divisions, and indicate further differences within similarities and analogies within oppositions. However, it often pays for its insightfulness with the clarity of the entirety. Essentially, speculativeness (over-intellectualizing) should be responsible for art following the path of complexity, and the main culprit on trial should be Giorgio Vasari – its first theoretician. Vasari’s theory aimed at elevating art from the level of crafts to the level of subordinate science ratio. It has regarded an artist’s work as a materialization of ideas, which meant not only its transcendental sources but also the optimization of composition and color-related solutions. A painting was supposed to be a “machine”, to which nothing can be added or subtracted without harming it. Although there was a chance of reaching ideal simplicity, it ended up exactly the opposite – with complication and entanglement.

The search for the optimum state is usually done in the cycle thesis – anti-thesis often delaying the conclusion ad finitum, burying every synthesis in the endlessness of potential solutions. Mannerism also left countless non finito abandoned along the way. A work of art, to which nothing can be added or taken away without damage is by definition too prone to subjectivism. An artist, polluted with the faith that there’s a possibility to bring such a being to life, against the known truth that “the devil is in the details” is often condemned to Sisyphean torments.

That is why Vasari had to look for further guidelines and he found them in the opinion of the majority: instead of endlessly searching for the one, ideal solution, he recommended compiling them out of the Great Masters’ achievements regarded as eminent: Rafael’s head, Michael Angelo’s musculature, Titian’s colors (Vasari, 2003). As a result of that democratization, the extreme complication of forms was further compounded by their eclectic recyclability. New solutions could only be the sum of the previous ones and the complexity – putting things together, that connect many separate fragments until that moment – became an academic standard.

Is that the reason why the periods of complexity should be related to the escalation of the artistic crisis? Should the domination of simplicity that followed after them be associated with overcoming doubts and progress? Essentially, eclectics should be an expression of some lack of faith in one’s own abilities, looking for shelter under the wings of authorities honored by Vasari in his immortal Lives of Painters. That is however not the end of the academician’s faults.

In favor of additional complexity was the crucial role that Vasari in his theory ascribed to the line. In drawing – the intellectual analysis of a form – the key method of visualization is setting the boundaries – the division. When the “naturalist” Leonardo da Vinci softened the line, which did not exist in nature, with his painterly sfumato, and Cézanne (not having other ambitions than a maximum approximation to nature) rejected it completely, the effect was synthesis and simplification based on the gradual blurring of unambiguous shapes. Through glazes, Leonardo achieved the rejection of strict borders, while Cezanne thanks to geometry achieved, the reduction of all the elements of painting to a common denominator. Those are tools that allow one to organize a flat surface not according to analytical variety but according to synthetic analogy.

That leads to the conclusion that what essentially differentiates simplicity from complexity in the visual arts is not the opposition: senses – intellect, but the favoring synthesis or analysis as a compositional rule, which determines the paintings’ internal relations between the detail and the whole.

Loose relations between the detail and the whole characterize not only Mannerist or Baroque paintings, entering us into perceptional confusion by joining groundlessly empty plains with the excess of detail. In particular, Dadaism was perfect in juxtaposing fragments primarily devoid of aim with its model product – collage, but also with informel, in which the whole is often a replication of a fragment.

In all these examples carrying out a synthesis is inhibited: the entirety of an artifact is about the dominance of a detail, excess of details or the lack of relationship between them that disorganizes the whole. That fact unveils the structural similarity of seemingly extremely distant visual schools: realism focused on narration and abstract expression, which are not similar in acting with relationships but in acting with the mass. In the first instance, that is the multitude of descriptive and literal motives and in the second one – the multiplication of varicolored splashes.

A domination of detail additionally assumes a composition-related openness and dynamic, making the process of perception disordered, because the lack of a dominant factor forced the viewer to a constant shifting of the view field. The eye frantically jumps from one detail to another, either attracted by the intensity of contrasts or by searching for mutual relationships, with difficulty keeping up with the focus (Arasse, 2013).

Therefore, both realism and abstract expression are bound to nature, which similarly to the object with prolificacy and entropy against any inclinations of the order setting hierarchizing or reduction. Meanwhile, a painting, which is hardly a fragment of reality, but its section (often subjective), at the same time has to constitute an inbred whole. The simplest method of merging its constituent elements is subordinating all of them to one of them – a dominant. The simplicity of such constructs is however too obvious and foreseeable, often more boring than the primary chaos. Less literal ways have to be used, a system that under the pretence of complexity would operate with the infallibility of simplicity, something which in a way is unclear for the recipient would make the synthetic clarity resistant to analysis. The paintings of Johannes Vermeer excel at using such a mechanism, they are one and the other: chaotic in close-up, but orderly from the distance. Particular elements when subjected to scrutiny turn out to be unrecognizable, amorphously painterly, whereas synthesized from a distance they reveal themselves with absolute clarity (Wheelock, 1995).

That is one of the examples when we do not say appreciatively: look at the way it’s done! But instead, we ask astounded: how is it done? Abstract stains, which so strongly legitimize the realism of presentation despite its indirectness, show the “phenomenon in which the same painting is not showing the same thing from up close as from a distance”.¹

The divisionist paintings of Georges Seurat act in a similar, although more “mechanical” way. From up close they show a shapeless, chromatic magma but from a distance, they create clear and recognizable forms.

The relationship between parts and the whole in Vermeer’s paintings is strict although not obvious. If we want to understand what can be seen in them, we often move closer trusting that we will see better if we put together a whole out of its parts, if we examine it piece by piece.

In the case of Vermeer, we come across a surprise: from up close his paintings turn out even more unrecognizable, we only see another dot describing another dot, but treated synthetically the areas still look as if we were watching them from a distance, they impact by an indivisible whole. His representations reach both the beginning of the painting process – putting together singular, meaningless brush strokes into a spatial whole, and the beginning of interpretation – the moment in which the painting is still plainly visual, a phenomenon devoid of linguistic references to reality (Marin, 2002).

Thanks to this observation it does not lose itself in reading details which inevitably becomes a reading out of senses. The viewer avoids another potential complication: contextualization. However if one had to choose between Vermeer and let’s say Henryk Siemiradzki, the statistical majority would choose the paintings of the latter. This is most likely mainly for his story-telling erudition.

If we want to see Siemiradzki’s painting we are most of all forced to recognize and then name and think of the thousands of things arranged around it, which – along with what Ernst Panofsky observed – causes us to no longer see the shapes nor the things but the story they are telling and even more – all the digressions implied by the story. What Siemiradzki extends endlessly with delight by adding further details, Vermeer closes in two precise sentences and although they do not explain everything they are intriguing at least with this understatement. That would be the difference between the condensate of poetry and the extravagance of fiction.

Superficial simplicity may then hide an internal complexity, whereas sophistication could be merely an unimaginative multiplication. What seems simple from afar, up close may turn out to be an exceedingly complicated machine, but also what is complicated from a distance on closer inspection might turn out to be just a scenography. The source of these phenomena is the not-so-obvious relations connecting the artifact’s particular pieces into a whole and for their discovery, it is necessary to employ an essential system of reference – the distance which we place ourselves towards the observed object.

The complication of these seemingly simple sets takes place not only through working out of particular elements but the subliming of the relations that connect them, which determine the course of boundaries between the objects, the dynamics of gradients and the clarity of lines. They might be sometimes gentle and then sharp, sometimes regular and then serrated, or they complicate themselves in many different ways. Indicating differences and finding relationships, disconnecting or connecting, but mostly: the dynamics of those changes, how softness shades into hardness, shadow into light and one texture turns into another – that is the secret weapon of a painting.

From the author’s point of view, it is fascinating how relatively small shifts in accents, the extraction of one relation or hiding another, completely change the visual structure of the entire representation: how thin is the line differentiating an exceptional effect from a trivial one? Sometimes only one additional point is enough for the entire work to be “complete”, to gain character. Other times such an inconspicuous addition throws back an almost finished artifact into an illegible chaos.

The exterior simplicity of visual sensations might be apparent, while essentially it concealsa highly complex mechanism This complexity does not arise from the sheer number of connected elements, but rather from the quality of those connections – the precisely established relationship between a few, selected elements. Analogically, a visible complication might be an effect of essentially banal and simple primitivism that constructs an illusion of complexity through mechanical multiplication. Amongst others, this is proven by the fact that the effective repetition of ingeniously simple things often is a more demanding task than copying a chaos in which precision loses meaning to the benefit of the mass.

A few seemingly uncomplicated parameters might work more intensely than an elaborate system, entering into a less obvious relationship, and at the same time creating a more infallible mechanism.

Although this rule is not necessarily applied to the term “category” in aesthetics, I would distinguish between two kinds of complication (or simplicity): a superficial and an evident – primary and deep. The second one which does not reveal itself at first sight, it exists in an artifact and makes it work. If we assume that things externally complicated may be supported by the structural simplicity, whereas lucid ones are often complex, what is more, that their exterior simplicity is often a result of their internal complexity, I might risk differentiating the quantitative complexity (which – unfortunately – complicates matters) right next to its sisterly qualitative complexity. That would consist of refining relations between relatively few elements, arising not from multiplicity but from disintegration and the variety of differences – change of line directions and divisions in the reference of compositions, or changes of shades in terms of color – but out of the way that a limited number of differences is composed and mutually matched.

I would look for the reasons of that quality-quantity ambiguousness hidden in reality not less than in people’s artifacts: on the one hand, in the features of its structure that are composed both out of details and wholes and, on the other hand, in the particularity of our senses in which observations are not always preceded by conclusions but sometimes exactly the opposite – they depend on them.

The simplicity or complexity of paintings is not solely an issue of their immanent features, but also a subjectivism in observing the differences and two basic ways we acquire impulses: analysis and synthesis. The relation of the distinction “simple – complex” with the senses, on the one hand, and intellectual evaluation on the other, in a wider context may even refer to the relationships of complexity with chaos or simplicity with order. The visual arts would then constitute an attempt to refer to the issue of the codependency of both categories: an ordered whole and complex fragmentation.

The first one, as it appears as simplicity, would hide an internal complexity; the second one would owe the apparent complication to the pressure put on a fragment, obscuring the recognition of the whole. When we soak up the whole we often don’t realize their detailed complication and vice versa: while we are lost in the maze of particular parts we see their primary role as richness and complexity. Many elements, although they objectively exist in the painting, keep them “invisible” both due to the crowding of sensations and the limitations of our perceptive apparatus.

Visual simplicity is often an effect of adequate coding of complexity in which the set of simplexes, independently of the number of its components ensures adequate clarity of the whole thanks to a skillful alignment of the properties of the artifact with the rules by which the receiver’s perceptive apparatus works. In reference to time, which for spatial visual arts is a certain challenge, it provides a dual effect: complexity extends the time of perception of the artifact, and simplicity provides immediate action, thereby eliminating the temporal extension of the painting in the meaning in which it exists in music.

What is fascinating in Vermeer’s paintings is that in their case we do not need time to get to know the whole but we need that time to soak in the unpredictability of spatial relationships, which connect the background with the foreground. Simple paintings – with their visual clarity are much more resistant to our gaze than visual complication, a mechanism devoid of synergy in which the multiplied elements actually act independently without establishing a mutual relationship. Due to that, they require that perception to be extended in time (Didi-Hubermann, 2005).

Nevertheless, it seems that finally, complexity is only a means, a tool to achieve simplicity or rather – to achieve an appropriate complication of that simplicity. This constant circulation of entanglement and simplification proves that overloading one with visual sensations is essential not only to accustom the senses of a recipient to simplicity but mostly to enable the artist to retrieve appropriately not obvious relationships from the maze of sensations. Formal entanglement, which is often an effect of the victory of relativism – the strong conviction of the impossibility of selecting just one, optimal version, has an essential methodological meaning for art. An unrefined extravagance would have a revelatory influence, fertilizing the aesthetics with a dose of new forms, combinations and unexpected effects, unachievable with more “calculated” and rational methods.