Gradus is a temporary space for contemporary art and gives (inter)national artists the possibility of a focused week-long preparation for a presentation/exhibition.
Gradus is a theme in the complexly constructed novel Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov. In the novel Gradus acts as an indicator of the interplay between the comment and the poem. It is yet another counterpoint which enriches the novel's structure even more. Nabokov was a writer who left little to chance, everything he wrote had a function or meaning.
Brian Boyd about Nabokov,
“But readers who stop there, and think that he stops there, in modernist irony or post-modernist abîme, miss what matters most to him: His positive irony, his attempt to encompass all the negatives, as he suspects life itself does, and to revers their direction in the mirror of death. The search for that possibility is what makes Nabokov different, and what makes him write.”
Gradus, the initiative, operates as a 'Logical Negation' (in the natural languages, logic and mathematics, a logical negation or denial is an operation which changes the value of the truth of a proposition from true to false and from false to true).
Gradus asks for a different kind of imagination and can offer a contextual contrast. These days all to often an initiative or work is 'offered' in language and image complying to the current norms. Gradus does this differently, the emphasis should be on the physical capacity of the space and the work the moment you see them, not on the descriptive, virtual explanation which normally precedes it. Gradus is the dark player in the fellowship of death, life and art and provides opportunity for the latter two. Gradus is compulsory. The artist is completely free in his reaction to this. The role of the initiator in this process is that of facilitator, both practically and emphatically.