[November 15, 2012] Paul Kolker presents “The Dot is In…Speak to Me!,” an exhibition of Kolker’s paintings and light sculptures that has been produced and curated by the artist with the intent of fostering an age-gone-by Schopenhauerian etiquette dictating that one “must stand before a picture, as before a prince, waiting to see whether and what it will speak to us.”
Kolker’s works are based on the fractionated image as he has first viewed it on his 1975 front end projector television which cast a low resolution grid of relatively large colored dots on a screen, and achieved clarity only when viewed from afar like the stadium LED screens of today. To him, the grid of dots, or other Euclidian shapes for that matter, became his branding for his journey into the digital age; now replete with pixelated television, computer and smart-phone screens. He first used analog methods of fractionating images; drawing rectilinear and other grids on the printed image, overlaying waffle glass or using prismatic and kaleidoscopic photographic lenses. Thereafter he composed his works using a primitive tapestry computer software program, honing his avant-garde process with PhotoShop, Illustrator and with his own proprietary fractionating programs.
Kolker uses his art as an experiment in perception in which the viewer becomes both the subjective measuring instrument and the assessor of the results. Although his work is based on a photograph and is process laden, when the image is broken down into its component parts and painted in his elemental palette, not mixing colors with each other, but only with black and/or white, it takes on that certain visual and poetic spirit of language. Kolker believes, that in this manner his works speak to the viewer in a voice that cannot be heard, but only felt!
In “Speak to Me!,” Kolker depicts the Barnett sisters as side by side, yet contrasting dot paintings (detailed above) to memorialize the US Supreme Court decision proclaiming that silence, or other non-speech, carries the same protections as speech, or artistic expression for that matter, under the First Amendment. On other walls hang portraits of: Martin Buber, the existential philosopher of dialogue and feelings; Shinobu Ishihara, known for his familiar multivariate and dotted color vision charts invented in the early twentieth century; Benoit Mandelbrot, shouting out an expansive new geometry of iterative processes and computer graphics; Albert Einstein, and his crying out that we see things differently relative to where one stands or moves; and more portraits, abstract Ishi-dot paintings, light sculptures and light-box paintings.
Please visit this exhibition and stand before each work as before a prince to “see” (in the Schopenhauer sense) what it will speak to you! “The Dot is In…Speak to Me!” is on view at Paul Kolker Gallery at 511 West 25th Street in Chelsea, adjacent to the HighLine between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues from November 15, 2012 through January 25, 2013…10AM to 6PM…Monday through Friday…Weekends by appointment.
For more information please call 212.367.7300, or email info@paulkolker.com.