After decades of art-making under the shadows of Bauhaus type Euclidean geometry, Kolker since 2001 has radically refocused his gaze on his renaissance, bathed in the spotlight of fractal geometry, the operative mathematics of our digital age. As in the preceding shows of his Go Digital! series, Kolker intuitively questions our experience like a thesis for an experiment. “How can we sustain our cultural humanity founded in analogies based upon intuition and feelings in a digital world now controlled by empirical algorithms of “on-off” switches?” Simply stated, the answer is the Buberian objects of the “I-It” and “I-Thou” relationships. It is our continuing dialogue toward an aesthetic oneness with the “It”; the works of art…and their “Thou”; the artist.
A surprising truth is that both the line and the dot (or Euclidian ‘point’) are the progenitors of the mathematics of fractal geometry and computer graphics. In his current series of twenty-one compressed circle paintings heralded in this exhibition, Kolker creates his ‘endless loop transformation’ of Hilbert’s curve of a line that never crosses itself and completely fills space through an iterative process explained, almost a century later, by Mandelbrotian fractal geometry. The paintings are ‘hard-edge,’ colorfully lyrical, yet profound, and exhibit a new dimension of fractionation by compression. A similar compression format is the basis for storage of our genetic information in chromosomes as well as digital information in computers.
Dialogue Continues: Paintings, Photographs & Sculpture 2010, installation views
Two new super-sized works with a large scale grid of ‘hard-edge’ painted dots, transform the artist’s abstract images of watercolor on paper, through a process which Kolker calls fracolor, using computer graphics for fractionation and an elemental palette of RGBY colors, mixed only with black and/or white, but never mixed with each other. Above image: The Dialogue Continues, noir, (2009), acrylic on canvas, a fracolor in eighteen parts, 99×198 inches.
The show also revisits the preceding exhibition, Go Digital! The Dialogue, with two large scale (132 x 132 inches) paintings of Martin Buber (which are highly defined when viewed from afar or through your cell phone camera and appear obscure from close-up), and seven sculptures called ‘fractal boxes’ of glass, mirror, and LED lights, which reflect and iterate dots of LED lights toward infinity. The images are based on the Euclidian rectangle, triangle, circle, line and dot (or point) familiar to those revisiting the works of the Bauhaus school. However, the fractal boxes display the new geometry of fractal expansion, iteration within an illusory space and a parallax dependent upon the viewer’s position in time and space. Is that not ‘relativity’? Then please also look forward towards the concluding show of Kolker’s Go Digital! series, Einstein and Mandelbrot, and their Footprints on the Sands of Time…Go Digital! The Epilogue (opening on February 25, 2010).
Paul Kolker: “The Dialogue Continues: Paintings, Photographs and Sculpture” — December 17, 2009 through February 18, 2010.