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.