Drumer’s works draw a parallel between painting and music, compositions and rhythms, and colors and motion in the spirit of early 20th century German avant garde films made by artists and filmmakers such as Hans Richter, Walter Ruttmann and Oskar Fischinger. These avant garde artists probed the relation between painting and cinema and were influenced, among other, by the paintings of Kandinsky. Rejecting the idea that cinema is a medium designed to reproduce the reality of the world of objects, they regarded it as a means to broaden the boundaries of the static painting and as inviting a dynamic treatment of movement, and thereby relatable to another abstract art form – music.
An interesting fact is that today’s abstract contents of TV programs aired on channels targeting babies and toddlers sometime resemble the abstract language of avant garde films of the 1920s. And for a reason – there is a connection between the object-free, abstract world of avant garde cinema, the vision of an infant, who sees a series of objects as colorful light spots and is unable to separate them, and the abstract nature of children’s paintings.
Kandinsky and Klee were also influenced by children’s paintings. Klee, whose naïve paintings bear resemblance to children’s paintings, even studied his own childhood art in order to freshen and sharpen his vision. Drumer replaces Kandinsky’s dreamy colorful forms with on-screen slow meditative motion, which brings to mind a kaleidoscopic mobile swirling above a cot, or the imaginary world of color and light created in the mind of the little child who looks at it. Drumer is apparently aware of the precariousness of innocence and therefore encloses Kandinsky’s painting within black and white grid. The colorful and playful interpretation he gives to Mondrian’s monochromatic work also ties his After Mondrian to childhood.
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