Montagne Sainte-Victoire Divided into Twenty-Five Squares Vera Molnar

The painting titled Montagne Sainte-Victoire Divided into Twenty-Five Squares consists of a thick line delineating the profile of the mountain, with certain parts of the line missing.
Vera Molnár’s starting point was the Gaussian curve, in which, one day, she suddenly recognised the outline of the enormous mountain on the outskirts of Aix-en-Provence, immortalised in dozens of works by Paul Cézanne. The memory of this realisation is recorded in several collages, also in the museum’s collection, which the artist made on one of her visits to the Southern French city, looking out of a window of the Fondation Vasarely. The profile of Montagne Sainte-Victoire – a motif jointly used by Cézanne and Molnár – facilitates a comparison between their different artistic methods. Cézanne’s intent was to model the permanence and constant transformation of nature, which he achieved by “inventing” the coloured brushstrokes that are the building blocks of the visually perceived world, and by reconstructing the naturally occurring image on canvas. In contrast, Vera Molnár looks for the basic material of the world, which also includes us, humans, in the field of mathematics; by taking a curve formed in accordance with the rules of mathematics, dividing it up into parts, and gradually performing deliberate distortions of these parts, she eventually arrives at her outline of the mountain.