The Dot Is In!…And Over The Line

[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.

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.