Heinz Mack
«Resting Restlessness»

Painting engages the eye–this confrontation occurs dynamically–our eyes enjoy resting in restlessness.
The restlessness of rest, however, is scarcely perceptible, a contrast to the rhythm of the heart; it is movement that destroys itself; it does not give us the kind of vision that is alert, clear, and a measure of the immeasurable. Our painterly sensibility is a sensibility of sight. The motionless and the finite limit our vision and tire our eyes, and in the end deny them.
Among all the possible conditions derived from the concept of movement, only one is aesthetic: resting restlessness–it is the expression of continuous movement, which we call «vibration,» and which our eyes experience aesthetically. Its harmony stirs our souls, as the life and breath of the work.
Just as a strong wind gives form to a thousand clouds, so creative movement can give spatial organization to color and formal components; in movement color finds resting restlessness, its form. To me, movement is the true form of a work.
Every dynamic component of form (no matter how minuscule and how limited its energy) has within itself the restlessness to exceed itself, to remain open to its surroundings even though it faces powers of equal strength that offer a continuous boundary.
The restlessness of a line: it wants to be a plane. The restlessness of a plane: it wants to be space.
This restlessness conforms to our painterly sensibility. Lines, surfaces, and space must continually merge with one another, «cancel out» one another (in the dialectical sense). If this integration is visible, a work vibrates, and our eyes meet with resting restlessness.
Much gets decided at the borderlines of the various components; no less critical, however, is the reaction of color, whose quantity and light intensity are as consequential as the degree of distribution of units of form and their overall relation to the format of the work.


Source: Heinz Mack, «Resting Restlessness,» ZERO 2 (1958); reprinted in Otto Piene and Mack, eds., trans. Howard Beckman (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1973), p. 40–41.
Kristine Stiles, Peter Selz (Hg.), Theorie and Documents of Comtemporary Art 1966, p. 410.