Moving Piet, 2014

The original painting is attributed in contemporary art scholarship to Piet Mondrian. It is now lost and is said to have borne the title "Untitled". The year of its creation is unknown.

The Stuttgart copyist Nico Franz took up the question of whether Piet Mondrian could not have made a mistake in this work, in which he disregarded the compelling symmetry by the selection of the number of surfaces. In other words, whether he did not erroneously assume the positioning of the lines as a condition for the resulting surfaces instead of the positioning of the surfaces as a condition for the lines.

In his work "Moving Piet" (2014), Nico Franz amusingly resolves this question in a visual process that first of all transforms the chaos caused by Mondrian compositional theory into the lost order that the latter opposed, and then shows first the alternative and finally also the final representation of each composition: namely, the movement itself as the highest goal.

Here he does not shy away from developing the 2Dimensionality of Mondrian's painting further and transferring it into 3D space, in order to make this highest goal, obviously unintended by Mondrian, evident, the movement as a catharsis of solidified structures. By virtue of the accompanying composition, this intention is further reinforced, thereby clarifying the basic message of this early copyist masterpiece as an expression of its medium: the viewer seeking knowledge errs immanently and can only liberate himself through his model.

The copyist's liberation, on the other hand, lay in the creative process itself. Since the essence of art is not consumption, this process alone was his intention. Where others, in this process and thereafter, more radically and certainly more sublimely separate themselves from their audience, Nico Franz is much more concerned to acknowledge himself as part of his audience and thus also as a consumer. If only for a short time.