In a Blink of the Eye!

[January 30, 2013] Paul Kolker is pleased to present “In a Blink of the Eye!” from March 7 to April 26, 2013 at the artist’s Chelsea gallery. Kolker uses dots in his works to remind us of our normative way of viewing pictures and text made up of dot arrays on our television and computer screens and on printed pages. In his current works on canvas and in light sculptures, where dots also represent the pupils of our eyes, Kolker fills the dots with partially transparent images of what he, the artist, believes is the essence or spirit of the subject matter.

“In a Blink of the Eye!,” produced, curated and exhibited by the artist, is about the way everything which we physiologically see is subject to certain biases learned from our life experiences; including education, image memories, subliminal suggestions, feelings and even imagining or dreaming that which is not founded in reality. Kolker creates a series of images made up of mini images within the dots comprising the master image. Although Kolker’s process is not quite the automatism of surrealism, the artist says that his works are founded in Benoit Mandelbrot’s new fractal geometry of repeating forms and its more modern computer based derivatives.

The pupil of the eye to Kolker has become the dot which circumscribes the lens to our visual worlds. But unlike the image which passes through the lens of the camera and projects on to a digital receptor back or film, the image transmitted through the eye to the retina and the optical cortex is merely subjective and different to each beholder depending upon individual biases, feelings and memories.

Kolker’s adaptiveness of incorporating new media into his art making was honed by his being surrounded by avant garde technologies throughout his career as a cardiothoracic surgeon. His work is founded in photography and its rigors of objectivity. The photograph is collaged and transformed into a grid of tiles, like the process of tessellation used by the ancient mosaic artists, but now using computer based methods. Colors are fractionated so that each tile is of a single painted acrylic or ink jet color, tint or shade. When painted, a vinyl dot stencil is used or a grid of dots is silkscreened.

Novel to this exhibition is a new quadratic dot grid using an array of seven different sized dots creating a mosaic pattern, with only one color to each dot, in attribution to Dr. Shinobu Ishihara’s color blindness charts developed around 1915. The randomness of the variation in dot sizes gives the works a gestural quality of movement, texture and depth.

Highlighted in the show, as depicted above, is a large scale work on canvas, In a Blink of the Eye!, 2013, 132×198 inches in which the picture’s subject is also the object; the image of the painting reflected on to the face of the lens, repeating ad infinitum like a feedback experiment in fractal geometry.

“In a Blink of the Eye!” is on view from March 7 through April 26 at Paul Kolker gallery at 511 West 25th Street adjacent to the High Line between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues in Chelsea.