[May 17, 2007] “Surge on to the gardens,” is about the urgency to rescue our hibernal and wintry hemisphere by re-greening our environment, thoughts and feelings.
What began as an experiment about minimalism in 1980 has evolved into Kolker’s procedure based style of painting which he calls “fracolor.” Using waffle-glass at first and now fractal computer programs, the artist fractionates the subject image and paints and silk-screens a grid circumscribing colored dots. His palette is founded in light optical and pigment color theories from which he has selected red, blue, green and yellow plus anachromics black and white. Kolker creates shades, tints and tones by mixing colors with black and white while eschewing mixing colors with each other.
Picture roses, dahlias, impatiens, water lilies, a bouquet, and garden statuary. Spring “hangs” eternal on the salon walls!
Also picture the mythological story of Persephone picking flowers with her sisters in the plain of Enna. Demeter, goddess of fertility, in her anguish over Hades” abduction of her daughter, Persephone, had created (as the story goes) the first wintry “inconvenient truth.”
In a transformation of the 1909 painting by John William Waterhouse “Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May”, Kolker creates his ‘gather ye rosebuds while ye may, old time is still a-flying’ painted in bright elemental colors of springtime and “…this same flower that smiles today, tomorrow will be dying” painted in subdued shades and tints, reflecting another “inconvenient truth” or nightmare perhaps.
Paul Kolker: Surge on to the gardens — Opening May 17, 2007.