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The Dot Is In!…And Over The Line

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[May 3, 2012] “Paul Kolker: The Dot Is In!…And Over The Line”, an exhibition of abstract grids of colored dots painted over figurative, stark, black and white images made of lines, loops and curves. For Kolker, the dot represents the digital world of empirical data, while the line represents the analog world of feelings, imagination and intuition… connecting the dots!

Kolker’s new paintings, the segue from his preceding exhibition, “Shadows Of The Real”, continue to synthesize the abstract with the real regardless of the viewer’s parallactic perspective or distance from the painting. However, hidden within his paintings are the mystical and mathematical paradigms for his works; the sum of the product of the number of dots in his painting is nine, that same sum of the gematria of the Hebrew word for life; the Mandelbrotian fractal geometry of iterative processes which mathematically portrays the coastlines, city lines, human anatomic dissections, tree branchings, loops, curves, straight lines, upper case letters and linear streams of LED lights reflecting towards infinity… as depicted in the show.

Image above: may flowers over the tree line, 2012, inkjet and acrylic on canvas, 99 x 99 inches

A series of dots when connected forms a straight line, curve or loop. Both the line and the curve are open ended. The loop is closed or continuous, without beginning or end. The dot is circumscribed by a circle, a loop that has a radius equidistant from its center. An exhibition of Kolker’s squiggle paintings of loops of compressed circles, (based on Hilbert’s turn of the 19th Century mathematical open ended curve which is a basis for electronic microchips), is currently on view as part of a retrospective of the artist’s works at the North Shore/LIJ Hofstra School of Medicine, Uniondale, NY.

In “The Dot Is In!… And Over The Line”, canvases of images in black and white lines are overlaid with a grid of dots painted in tints and shades; the colored dots purposefully interrupt the figurative line image and invite the viewer to question and seek information obscured by the overlain dots. Perhaps the artist, using his metaphorical new media brush, is painting digital age hypertexts or hidden codes within his works summoning the intuitions and cerebral search engines of the viewer? In this manner Kolker’s paintings and sculpture are experiments in perception using the viewer as the measuring instrument in reliance on her learned biases as well as her instant feelings and intuitions.

Of the twenty four paintings displayed in the salon style, many are derivative of the shadow paintings, however the shadows are replaced by their outline and overlain with a grid of painted dots; others are early 19th Century line prints, the line etchings of yore, before the dawn of the new era of Ben Day and half tone dots, also overlain with colored dots; some are grids of dots painted over the upper case text of fractionated tiles of this press release; yet others are black and white images, some reversed, of the bare tree tops surrounding the artist’s Long Island studio… and also overlain with painted colored dots.

In “Paul Kolker: The Dot Is In!… And Over The Line”, thirty-six paintings, light sculptures and a ceiling mural are on view downstairs at the Salon of Studio601, 511 West 25th Street between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues from May 3 through June 21, 2012.

In “Paul Kolker: The Art of Medicine… Empirical, Intuitive or Both?” fifty-seven paintings and light sculptures are on view at the North Shore/LIJ Hofstra School of Medicine at Hofstra University North Campus, Uniondale, NY ongoing through June 30, 2012.

Press Release

The Dot Is In!… Shadows Of The Real

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[March 8, 2012] Paul Kolker: The Dot Is In!… Shadows Of The Real is an exhibition of abstract paintings and light sculptures based on the photographs of the real objects from which the projected shadows were derived. Kolker’s works are founded in the intersection of the empirical or digital world of data symbolized by the dot and the artful world of our senses, intuitions and feelings.

The show has been conceived and curated by the artist as an experiment in perception using the viewer as the analytic, albeit subjective and biased, measuring device. Each work challenges and questions the viewer’s instant and past experience as to her empirical pattern recognition, intuition and evoked feelings about anamorphically distorted shadows of abstract Mandelbrotian geometric shapes superimposed with an abstract, although rectilinear, grid of dots painted gesturally and randomly in tints, shades, grayscale and gloss glazes; or combinations thereof. As an abstraction over another abstraction, each provides the sensorial atmosphere for the other…like viewing a shadow of the real thing through a grid of glossy dots suggesting an illusion of smoke and mirrors, fog, rain drops or the sparkles of bright sunlight, perhaps!

Image: me and my shadow, 2012; acrylic on canvas, 99 x 99 inches – a fracolor in nine parts

Although the works in the show have been purposely made both minimal and abstract by Kolker, they are all derived from photographs of real objects, taken by the artist at sunrise, and their ever changing and elongated shadows which the sun projects on to surfaces in the artist’s home. They are the shadows cast by the window mullions, slats of window shades, foliage of potted house plants, chairs, tables and sculpture…falling on to such forms, spaces and surfaces as a tiled or carpeted floor; or on to the sofa, a bed, pillows, sculptures on pedestals, paintings on walls, doors and tops of cabinets and appliances. Those ephemeral shadows of the real vaporously and spacially contort themselves in anamorphic distortions over the continuum of ever changing surfaces of volumetric forms and intersecting planes as a smorgasbord feast for fractal geometricians, 3D modelers and for Kolker, in particular.

That overlaid grid of painted dots is iconic for our digital age of particle physics, molecular and genomic biology, as well as the light emitting pixels we see without noticing them on high definition television, computer and cell phone display screens. In addition, that same Kolker dot grid adds a dimension of depth to the composite abstract paintings in the show. Be it because of the foreground luminosity of the painted dots and the far ground darkness of the grid itself serving as a chiaroscuro Trompe-l’oeil, or as the inadvertent modern day variant of the renaissance sfumato which like puffy smoke iterating within a field of mirrors, or glazes, an otherwise flat underlying shadow in a painting acquires a certain heft. For Mona Lisa’s smile, her nasolabial skin creases were fattened by Leonardo Da Vinci’s pigment dotted smokey glazes, as if a collagen filler or fat were anachronistically injected by a plastic surgeon. And of course, science bears empirical evidence in the use of dot grids by pediatric ophthalmologists to test binocular vision and depth perception in children.

Paul Kolker: The Dot Is In!… Shadows Of The Real — March 8 through April 27, 2012.

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The Dot is In…Framed!

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[November 17, 2011] Paul Kolker: ‘The Dot is In…Framed!’ is an exhibition of new dot paintings which are painted on ink-jet on canvas prints of eighteenth and nineteenth century gilded frames, photographed and transformed by the artist in such a manner that the frame becomes an integral and compositional part of the subject rather than a mere decorative appendage of the work.

Kolker portrays the dot as the primordial building block of our digital world; iconic for the sub-atomic particles which we cannot see with our naked eyes; or the glowing pixels, which we can barely see on the display screens of our television, computer and mobile phone. The dpi (dots per inch) has become the new yardstick for the resolution and definition of everything which is digital. Even that amorphous polymer, crystal or plastic skin of paint on canvas, when viewed under the electron microscope, appears as dot-filled necklaces of molecules strung together in a lattice of dots. Zoom in towards anything in our physical universe and you will see the dot; or neutrino, neutron, positron, electron or other particles, spinning in the sub-microcosm of a universe which looks so much like that dot-filled, starry night we can see with our naked eyes. From up close or from afar, Kolker’s world is replete with dots; as it has been for more than thirty years.

Image: the dot is in and framed! 2011 inkjet and acrylic on canvas 66×99 inches

The artist has previously tested the printed and painted frames as a integral and compositional component of his portraiture dot paintings in his December 2006 exhibition, ‘About Faces’. Ironically, the frame subsumed the strength of the portrait and became part of the subject. But what if the frame, as an image representing a real and easily identifiable object, now surrounds a minimal field of color or an abstracted or otherwise not easily identifiable form or shape left to the viewer’s cognition, interpretation and imagination?; like amorphous or structured patterns of dots which have for so long stood boldly on their own merits, capturing the viewer’s complete field of vision without the constraints of a frame!

Last year Kolker photographed, at The Louvre, hundreds of paintings selected because of the particularities of their frames; such as gilding, tooling and ornate bas relief plaster motifs. This cohort of frames has become the subject of the instant experiment, questioning and testing how an image of a frame more than one or two hundred years senior to its youthful, contemporary and abstract dot painting, can marry each other on canvas, metaphorically. How does an abstract dot painting interact with the viewer when: insinuated into the constraints and boundaries of a trompe l’oeil ghost of a frame?; or when the frame is central and the dot painting both circumscribes and insinuates it?; or just circumscribes it?; or when the frame is a real three dimensional antique frame?

Among the sixty works in the exhibition is ‘the dot is in and framed!’, 2011, (depicted above) based on a photograph of the artist’s ‘tints and shades’ dot painting which was produced on a canvas of sufficient size to be insinuated into a nineteenth century gold leaf wood and plaster ornamental frame in the artist’s collection.

Paul Kolker: The Dot is In…Framed! — November 17, 2011 through February 17, 2012.

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Tints and Shades Redux

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[September 22, 2011] Paul Kolker: Tints and Shades Redux is an exhibition of dot paintings, prints and light sculpture is about how color is perceived in relation to its presentation. In this show, Kolker explores the question of the aesthetic values of perceived color through new dot paintings made in his limited color palette, but in tints and shades painted on black, white or grayscale background fields.

Kolker paints or prints dots of solitary color. His palette is minimal,consisting of red, green, blue and yellow; the physiological human vision colors. Although he adheres to the aesthetic purity of color unmixed with another color and painted in the shape of minimal geometric forms, he creates a myriad of tints and shades producing a gamut of pastel-like colors. Tints are colors mixed with white; shades, with black. Mixing with both black and white effects a grayscale. The resultant visual effect of painted dots in tints and shades is reminiscent of the eighteenth-century pastelists, who using crayons explored a faster and less expensive way than painting in oils to effect portraiture. The crayons were fabricated with colors mixed with chalk, lamp-black or combinations of black and white, also producing a grayscale of tints and shades.

Image above: tints and shades bezold noir, 2011; Image right: tints and sahdes bezold blanc, 2011

However, Kolker further developed his minimalist style of painting for other reasons besides his adherence to elemental colors and minimal shapes and forms. As far back as 1975, the alignment grid of his three color tube front end projector television became the root basis for his art. By zooming up close to the screen, the image appeared to be an abstraction of colored dots; while from afar it no longer appeared pixelated, but in fact it became a sharp, clear and more highly defined photographic image. Thus, parallax, that zoom apparatus of our digital age, and the television, computer and cell phone screens and their dot arrays have become iconic of Kolker’s works.

Tints and Shades Redux, 2011, installation — studio601, New York, NY

Like the pastel portrait artists who drew solitary strokes of color laid down next to the other or each over the other, creating a gamut of complex colors through optical color mixing, Kolker achieves a similar effect with his colored dots. His works are large in scale and modular. He uses fractal graphics programs to fractionate and deconstruct a photographic image into grids of dots, squares, lines, curves or loops. Using screen printing or plotter-scanner vector cuts he reconstructs the image into a painting of fractionated colors. A grid of black or white circumscribes the colored dots, much like the sub-pixels of a liquid crystal display, plasma or LED screen, or the phosphors of the cathode-ray tube as viewed in a dark field. In this manner he creates paintings which appear abstract up close and highly defined when viewed from afar; high definition photographs which are pixellated with dots of solitary colors; and light box sculptures using LED lights and images iterating ad infinitum. This iterative process, employing a reconstruction of fractionated shapes and color, Kolker calls ‘fracolor’ in attribution to Benoit Mandelbrot and his fractal geometry of repeating shapes and forms.

Depicted above are details of two large scale paintings in the show. To the left, tints and shades, bezold noir; and to the right tints and shades, bezold blanc. Each are painted with colors of identical mixing formulas, but one is painted on a black field and the other on white. Each produces a distinctive optical color mixing effect, as originally described by Wilhelm von Bezold more than a century ago.

Also, in the show of thirty works, are a series of ‘ishi eight’ dot paintings, (based on an Ishihara color vision chart testing the viewer’s ability to discern the number eight) in which the artist further explores the aesthetic as well as physiological determinatives of how we perceive color; and how some of us, mainly some men, are color blinded in distinguishing certain tints and shades of red and green.

Paul Kolker: Tints and Shades Redux — Opening reception September 22, 2011.

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The Art of Medicine: Empirical, Intuitive or Both?

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[July 1, 2011] A medical school may seem like an unlikely location for an art exhibit, but to artist Dr. Paul Kolker, a cardiothoracic surgeon and Hofstra Law School graduate, the Hofstra North Shore- LIJ School of Medicine provides the ideal setting. The educational environment at the School of Medicine meshes perfectly with Dr. Kolker’s intention–creating the idea of how art and medicine are intrinsically linked.

“The Art of Medicine: Empirical, Intuitive or Both?” is now on exhibit through 2012 at the School of Medicine, located at 500 Hofstra University on the north side of campus. The exhibition was produced by Studio601 with its staff artists Jeff Kessel, Vanessa Juriga, Becca Baldwin and Executive Director John Steele, who also curated the show. The 58 works were selected from the artist’s vast collection of paintings and light sculptures because of their relationship to the world of medicine and healthcare.

The Art of Medicine: Empirical, Intuitive or Both?, 2011/2012, installation — Hofstra North Shore – LIJ School of Medicine, Hempstead, NY

Kolker, who lives in Old Westbury, is lending the exhibit to the School of Medicine where he hopes it will inspire students to see the interconnective nature between art and medicine.

“This exhibition of Dr. Kolker’s work will provide our medical students with a unique environment that can speak to them on many levels,” said Dean Smith. “We are extremely fortunate to have this opportunity to exhibit these works in our new facility and I hope that visitors will feel welcome to stop by and view the exhibit.”

Kolker says: “You will find that how you look at the works exhibited at The School of Medicine, and what each says to you, requires the same empirical and intuitive skill sets used by doctors in examining and diagnosing their patients. Therefore, to hone their skills, why not immerse medical students in an ocean of the arts in addition to the sciences?”

Kolker states that his recent works have a central focus on “the digital age we are living in” and has relevance to the graphic and pixilated world of contemporary culture, media and information transfer, as we view TV, computers and cell phone screens. He attributes his process-laden and repetitive patterning of minimal shapes and forms in his works, with homage, to Benoit Mandelbrot’s fractal geometry.

The exhibition at the School of Medicine includes Let There Be Light, a 15-foot-high-mirror and LED light optical sculpture, which the artist calls a fractal box; a series of historic moments in healthcare history titled “Go Gesundheit!”, as well as numerous works of fractal geometric shapes and patterns.

The relationship between art, medicine, healthcare and healing is also embraced by the Mayo Clinic which displays art in its facilities as an important part of the healing environment. The Journal of the American Medical Association also uses art to illustrate the front cover of that weekly journal.
Dr. Kolker is a New York City-based artist with doctorate degrees in medicine and law. He is Emeritus Chief of Cardiothoracic Surgery at North Shore – LIJ Glen Cove Hospital. He began his career of painting and sculpture in the 1960′s, illustrating many of his peer review medical journal articles and life casting anatomical models.

For more information on Paul Kolker’s The Art of Medicine: Empirical, Intuitive or Both? call (516) 463-7585 or visit the Hofstra University website.

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and this same flower that smiles today, 2007

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and this same flower that smiles today, tomorrow will be dying, 2007
acrylic on canvas laid on board, a fracolor in sixteen parts
96 x 96 inches

Over & Over

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[May 26, 2011] Paul Kolker: Over & Over continues his bold experimentation with light as a medium while preserving those minimalist standards fundamental to the aesthetic purity of his work. However, in this show he dazzles the viewer with the subtleties of light trapped in glossy colored layers painted over each other on his canvases and with cascades of that more intense light reflected over and over between the mirrors in his sculptures.

Those minimalist aspects of structure and color, as in the dot grid patterns of television and computer screens and those of half tone color printing, have remained key to Kolker’s art paradigm and digital culture message. Kolker professes, that because of technological advancement towards higher and higher definition (including holograms and recently improved 3D imaging), we have become increasingly oblivious to the differences between the real thing and the imaginary or virtual. Like a skin pinch test to see if the subject is real, Kolker deconstructs a photograph of the real and intentionally transforms it by fractionation into low definition grids of dots painted in elemental colors by a process which he calls ‘fracolor,’ (coined as an homage to Benoit Mandelbrot and his fractal geometry of shapes repeating over and over). In a mirror clad room hangs the artist’s large scale painting of Mandelbrot, iterating perhaps fifty feet into an imaginary space.

On intersecting walls hang two super sized (11×16.5 feet) abstract and halftone paintings of Chuck Close’s philtrum, the depression over the upper lip. One is painted over a white, and the other over a black background. Kolker is inspired both by Chuck Close, and his heroic artistic metamorphosis, and by that powerful Midrashic legend, which informs us that we are conceived already having a universe of knowledge. However, while in utero, our upper lip is touched by the finger of God, forming the philtrum and eracing all that knowledge we already had. We are born to spend our lives learning, over and over again, that knowledge which was once ours.

Paul Kolker: Over & Over — Opening May 26, 2011 and ongoing throughout the summer.

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Let There Be Light!

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[February 1, 2011] Paul Kolker, ‘Let There Be Light!’ is an exhibition of twenty-four recent sculptures, using light as its primary medium, speaks to the minimalist concepts of a new and more expansive geometry which have driven our digital graphics technology and how we see things in our illuminated world of television, computer and cell phone display screens.

Kolker’s art addresses that digital culture in which we are immersed and barely notice because it has become an autonomic part of how we now perceive the world around us. In this show, he makes us aware of the new ways by which we see things through the new looking glass of our digital age with glass, mirror, light emitting diodes… and of course, the light itself!

Kolker made his first light sculptures in 1973; his bathroom vanity mirror in which he shaves almost every day, repeatedly reflects an image of the viewer, the contents of the counter top, and the round soffits of the overhead lights; and also that same year, a wall hanging made of triangles of mirror forming pyramids, mounted on board, and scattering spots of light on to an opposing mirror towards infinity.

In 1975, his Advent three tube front end projection television became the laboratory instrument for his then developing art theory, self educating himself in optical color practicalities while using the calibrating grids to focus each of the R, G, B projected images of colored dots. The top of the cabinet housing the projector had a piece of glass on it, which mirrored the projected image. Animated reflections became exciting to him, so he built from parts a satellite receiver, erected a dish antenna and in 1979 outfitted a media room in his home with beveled mirror strips covering the walls, reflecting the images of the room and of the television screen ad infinitum. In 1989 he began using LED message screens, one with ‘Good Shabbos’, and in another ‘The Truth is….’, scrolling out towards infinity in colored dots.

Let There Be Light!, 2011, installation — studio601, New York, NY

Since 2008, Kolker has mainly used LED lighting in his infinity light works, which he calls ‘fractal boxes’. As in his painting style, which he calls ‘fracolor’, founded in the repetition of dots in a grid matrix pattern, like that of a television, computer or cell phone screen, his light sculpture is also founded in that new geometry of repetitive forms and shapes mathematically explained through the fractal geometry of the late Benoit Mandelbrot.

Featured in the show are: ‘Through the Looking Glass: Turn On the Light, Turn off the Dark’, an installation in which a painting by the artist is reflected towards infinity within a super sized fractal box; and a series of Euclidian geometric shapes of LED light sculptures, some displayed in a group exhibition of works of light artists at the recent ‘Big Light Show’ at Anderson Ranch Art Center, Aspen, CO depicted (above) as installed in the artist’s studio.

Paul Kolker: Let There Be Light! — March 10, 2011 through May 5, 2011.

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The Pandora Syndrome…Go Gesundheit!

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[December 16, 2011] Paul Kolker: The Pandora Syndrome…Go Gesundheit! is an exhibition of paintings, prints and sculpture about our nation’s focus on health and healthcare and how we, like Pandora, continue to open the lids and covers of products that give us both pleasure and illness.

Kolker uses his already well established process of fractionation and color transformation which he calls fracolor. A combination of photography and light optics, computer graphics and plotter scanning, and inkjet and screen printing techniques are used to create the acrylic on canvas paintings, LED light box sculptures and inkjet on canvas ceiling mural prints in the show.

The artist, also a doctor and lawyer, in this show uses his art to preach the sermon of good health and to warn us of the perils of overindulgence and self-destructive habits. Kolker explains: “Many of our healthcare costs are generated by poor diet, sedentary lifestyle, obesity and overweight, smoking, alcohol and drug abuse. Especially, when we are metaphorically tethered to our sofas watching television, which through commercials suggest that we visit our refrigerator and pantry, like Pavlov’s dogs, we get up and go for the chips, dip and beer although we are not hungry. The cumulative effects over the years of this Pandora’s leisure paradigm, is the metabolic syndrome of cardiopulmonary and vascular diseases, hypertension, heart attack, stroke and diabetes. Think metabolic syndrome when you see a man or boy with an apple shaped torso and a woman or girl who looks like a pear.”

The Pandora Syndrome…Go Gesundheit!, 2010/2011, installation — studio601, New York, NY

In fact, most of Kolker’s new works in the Pandora Syndrome depict apples and pears. The paintings employ bold elemental colored letters spelling HOPE overlaid on images, which are fragmented toward abstraction and then reconstructed by collage and montage. As the Pandora’s Box narrative goes, after the lid was opened and illness was released, all that remains in the box is hope!

Paul Kolker: The Pandora Syndrome…Go Gesundheit! — December 16, 2010 through February 2011.

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Go Gesundheit!

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[September 29, 2010] Paul Kolker: Go Gesundheit! is a five part series of exhibitions based on the artist’s visual calculus of insights and intuitions about health and healthcare. In “…and Healthcare for All: The Prologue”, Dr. Kolker engages the viewer in a visual dialogue with paintings, prints and sculpture to promote feelings for and an understanding of America’s century-long journey towards ‘healthcare for all.’

Kolker’s dot matrix canvases are iconic of our digital age of cell phone, computer and television screens. However, it is his style of painting which is distinguished and founded in a process, ‘fracolor’, based on a new fractal geometry of iterative processes and expansive effects. At first an image is fractionated and then restructured into a grid of dots. Colors are not mixed with each other, but only with black and/or white. With his unique, but restrictive, palette he creates an illusion of a dreamscape in tints and shades. When the black background of the grid is highlighted by unmixed colored dots, the Bezold effect is expansive into the depths of the painting. While painting the dots white, or a near white tint, the dramatic chiaroscuro effects are reminiscent of a bright light in a field of darkness. Kolker regularly uses light in his works; particularly in his light box sculptures called ‘fractal boxes’ as well as in his paintings with foreground luminosity and background darkness for focus and depth effects. Of course, such infatuation with and comfort under the lights is not unusual for an artist who is also a surgeon!

Go Gesundheit!, 2010, installation at studio601, New York, New York

Like the composers of centuries ago whose orchestral compositions are recreated by the conductors and performing artists of today, Kolker, using photomontage, collage and his ‘fracolor’ process, has transformed and recreated paintings of those images from the past which comport with his vision of America’s journey towards ‘healthcare for all.’

In Public Option Redux (2010), acrylic on canvas, he revisits our only public healthcare option painted in the image of the signing of the Medicare and Medicaid Act of 1965

In The Obama Clinic (2010), acrylic on canvas, he transforms and renders anew the Thomas Eakins painting, The Agnew Clinic (1885), with President Obama operating on United States Healthcare and conducting a clinic on The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010.

In The Kolker Clinic (2010), acrylic on canvas, Kolker transforms the recently restored Eakins’ masterpiece, The Gross Clinic (1875)- now exhibited at The Philadelphia Museum of Art – with new faces which are highlighted against a dreamscape palette of tints and shades; surrounded by a black grid of colored dots, to remind us that we now live in the digital age and are already back to the future. No longer is the narrative that of a new feat of surgery by Dr. Gross at The Jefferson Medical College surgical amphitheater of the pre-antibiotic era; open drainage and mechanical cleansing of a young man’s infected thighbone in order to avoid amputation and its resultant disabilities was indeed an historic moment in 1875 healthcare!

Kolker’s new narrative is: The Kolker Clinic is more than a case of first impression of a surgical procedure in the history of medicine. It is also more than the art historical timelessness of procedural chiaroscuro. It is about the substantive energy of light itself, necessary for that identical, critical and sensory, visual perception in the studio and gallery as well as in the examining and operating room. It is about spotlighting. It is about spotlighting art; it is about spotlighting healthcare. But, it is mainly about enlightenment; that metaphorical ‘light from above’ which shines on to the faces of Dr. Kolker and his team, enabling them with an enhanced, perhaps prophetic, vision for ‘healthcare for all.’

The artist, who celebrates his fiftieth year as a Doctor of Medicine, is a cardiothoracic surgeon and Fellow of the American College of Surgeons. He is also a lawyer, member of The American Health Lawyers Association and Fellow of the American College of Legal Medicine. Dr. Kolker has served as founding director of a provider owned healthcare insurance company for more than a decade and has experienced American healthcare from many perspectives and disciplines.

Paul Kolker: Go Gesundheit! — Opening September 29, 2010.

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