About Faces, Places, Movers and Shakers

Paul Kolker presents About Faces, Places, Movers and Shakers at the PAUL KOLKER collection from September 20 through November 10, 2018. Using an algorithm which he calls ‘synthèse,’ Kolker transforms POTUS photographs from the news media and overlays them with the artist’s abstract halftone dot paintings. This exhibition serves as an experiment in the psychology of perception; studying how feelings of either adoration or animus about a painting’s subject matter may bias, either positively or negatively, the beholder’s visual perception.

Kolker invented his art process, ‘fracolor,’ nearly two decades ago based on his understanding of Ewald Hering’s ‘RGBY plus black and white’ opponent color vision theory and Benoit Mandelbrot’s fractal geometry of reductive and iterative processes. Kolker’s process reduces the beholder’s visual perceptions into self similar fractal-like particles of colored dots; like the ancient mosaic artists who tessellated wall images and floor patterns millennia ago. The process imitates the way we see things today on our flat screen LCD displays and their rectilinear dot grids as well as in print as Ben Day, color halftone, the multivariate dots of Shinobu Ishihara used in his color blindness test cards and in Kolker’s abstract and figural dot paintings. Not only do Kolker’s synthèse paintings in this show evoke hightened aesthetic feelings… but the algorithmic fusing of ultra high definition figuration with more painterly abstract dot patterns is a logical derivative of Kolker’s fracolor theory.

Kolker has used this reductionist approach for experimentation in facial recognition with exhibitions in December 2006, About Faces; in July 2008, About Faces, Too; and in April 2013, In a Blink of the Eye. In the latter show, Kolker’s painting, ABARACKADABRA, 2013 is an illusion rendered from an opacity gradient of layered images which transform the face of President Obama into President Lincoln; and vice versa.

In our instant exhibition, Kolker uses the Trump-Reagan nexus because of their administrations’ remarkable peacekeeping and economic accomplishments in spite of their similar administrative nonconformities to the classical mold of the presidency… whether regarding Iran and the Contras in the 1980s or Iran and ISIS, Hamas and Hezbollah today; ending the Cold War or the aspirational summit meeting for the nuclear disarming of the Korean Peninsula; all while simultaneously dealing with the strict scrutiny of the Tower Commission and Mueller probes. The official POTUS portraits of Trump and Reagan are transformed through an opacity gradient, conflating their pictorial morphosis from President Trump to an inadvertent hybrid Joe Biden look-alike, to President Reagan, as depicted above. In addition, Kolker uses his synthèse algorithm to transform other media photographs of Trump and Putin shaking hands in Helsinki and Reagan and Gorbachev in Reykjavik to declare that this show is not only about faces, but also about places. However, it is mainly about movers and shakers… the latter referring to those patriotic peace seekers who courageously reach out to shake the hands of their opponents as well as allies.

Paul Kolker (b. 1935) is a New York based artist with doctorate degrees in medicine and law. He is Fellow American College of Surgeons, Fellow American College of Legal Medicine and Emeritus Chief of Cardiothoracic Surgery at Northwell Glen Cove Hospital, having practiced cardiothoracic surgery on Long Island from 1969 to 2013. In October 2001 Kolker moved his Long Island studio to his current address in the Chelsea art district so that he could produce his works and curate his exhibitions as an experiment in perception. His studio and gallery have together become his laboratory in which the viewer is the measuring instrument for Kolker’s art as a perceptual experiment. About Faces, Places, Movers and Shakers is Kolker’s sixty-sixth solo exhibition.

In Paul Kolker: About Faces, Places, Movers and Shakers, thirteen new works are on view from September 20 through November 10, 2018 at the Paul Kolker collection, 511 West 25th Street in Chelsea, adjacent to the HighLine between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues.

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