Paul Kolker is pleased to present his seventy-third solo exhibition, Dialogical Perception… Art as Experiment at his studio, the PAUL KOLKER collection, 511 West 25th Street from February 6 through March 27, 2020. The exhibition tests the various sensorial interactions between the spectator and the exhibition; including interactions with other spectators, the artist, his associates, individual works and a combination of other variables. Kolker uses his painterly-photographic-process called ‘synthèse’ to colorize a recursion of abstract dot patterns layered over a figural portrait of Martin Buber, the author of I and Thou and proponent of a philosophy which connects the universe through hyphenated existential relationships such as I-Thou and I-It. Buber calls this connecting-relationship a dialogue… of words and feelings. Kolker expands Buber’s dialogue to a sensorial nexus beyond words and language, as in John Ruskin’s pathetic fallacy, in which paintings may speak to us visually; or Arthur Schopenhauer’s “… stand before a painting as before a Prince… and do not approach it unless it speaks to you first.” Mikhail Bakhtin calls this dialogic imagination; while Kolker calls it dialogical perception to include all sensory, cognitive, emotional as well as linguistic interactions. Kolker as artist both curates and produces his works and exhibitions using scientific experimental methods, technology intensive photographic and painting processes, expansive curatorial research, as well as novel installations and catalogue publications.

Kolker’s exhibitions study human perception and understanding; extrapolating towards aesthetic feelings and connoisseurship. His works are the test cards which employ experimental psychological methods to make us aware of those subliminal digital era effects of an immersive technology replete with rectilinear dot-gridded television, computer and smart phone display screens as well as the organic and fractal-like dot patterns first used more than a century ago by Shinobu Ishihara to test color vision. More recently, in the 1980s, Benoit Mandelbrot described those same dots of many sizes as the fractal foam of our universe, a panoply of dots of different sizes which are extant throughout nature as rain drops on a windshield, the frothing of the surf and the holes in Swiss cheese and breads. For Kolker, “a dot may be a universe… and a universe, a dot.”

As an example of the materials and methods used for each of the eighteen works in the show, five four- layered ishidots paintings were selected, photographed and formatted into a sandwich of twenty layers in inkjet, acrylic and polyurethane on canvas. Two are hung in the exhibition side by side, one in grayscale and the other in color. Each serves as the perception altering variable for the experiment and as an optical mask of the multidimensional dots placed over a portrait of Martin Buber taken from Kolker’s archives. This portrait of Buber is the substrate for the synthèse overlays depicted above. The resultant composite figural-abstract work has an additional overlay of four layers of semitransparent or colored ishidots of acrylic mixing medium on canvas fractionated into twenty-five parts; further abstracted into a rectilinear-mosaic-puzzle of paintings, including a close-up of panel 19 depicted above.

Installation Views: Dialogical Perception… Art as Experiment

In Paul Kolker: Dialogical Perception… Art As Experiment eighteen works are on view at the PAUL KOLKER collection adjacent to the HighLine at 511 West 25th Street in Chelsea between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues from February 6 to March 27, 2020. Paul Kolker: Dot Derivatives Synthèse… Abstractifying the Abstract, twenty-seven works are on view through January 31, 2020. Paul Kolker: Abstract Decalcomania… An Experiment in Perception is ongoing at 600 Third Avenue.