The show has been conceived and curated by the artist as an experiment in perception using the viewer as the analytic, albeit subjective and biased, measuring device. Each work challenges and questions the viewer’s instant and past experience as to her empirical pattern recognition, intuition and evoked feelings about anamorphically distorted shadows of abstract Mandelbrotian geometric shapes superimposed with an abstract, although rectilinear, grid of dots painted gesturally and randomly in tints, shades, grayscale and gloss glazes; or combinations thereof. As an abstraction over another abstraction, each provides the sensorial atmosphere for the other…like viewing a shadow of the real thing through a grid of glossy dots suggesting an illusion of smoke and mirrors, fog, rain drops or the sparkles of bright sunlight, perhaps!
Image: me and my shadow, 2012; acrylic on canvas, 99 x 99 inches – a fracolor in nine parts
Although the works in the show have been purposely made both minimal and abstract by Kolker, they are all derived from photographs of real objects, taken by the artist at sunrise, and their ever changing and elongated shadows which the sun projects on to surfaces in the artist’s home. They are the shadows cast by the window mullions, slats of window shades, foliage of potted house plants, chairs, tables and sculpture…falling on to such forms, spaces and surfaces as a tiled or carpeted floor; or on to the sofa, a bed, pillows, sculptures on pedestals, paintings on walls, doors and tops of cabinets and appliances. Those ephemeral shadows of the real vaporously and spacially contort themselves in anamorphic distortions over the continuum of ever changing surfaces of volumetric forms and intersecting planes as a smorgasbord feast for fractal geometricians, 3D modelers and for Kolker, in particular.
That overlaid grid of painted dots is iconic for our digital age of particle physics, molecular and genomic biology, as well as the light emitting pixels we see without noticing them on high definition television, computer and cell phone display screens. In addition, that same Kolker dot grid adds a dimension of depth to the composite abstract paintings in the show. Be it because of the foreground luminosity of the painted dots and the far ground darkness of the grid itself serving as a chiaroscuro Trompe-l’oeil, or as the inadvertent modern day variant of the renaissance sfumato which like puffy smoke iterating within a field of mirrors, or glazes, an otherwise flat underlying shadow in a painting acquires a certain heft. For Mona Lisa’s smile, her nasolabial skin creases were fattened by Leonardo Da Vinci’s pigment dotted smokey glazes, as if a collagen filler or fat were anachronistically injected by a plastic surgeon. And of course, science bears empirical evidence in the use of dot grids by pediatric ophthalmologists to test binocular vision and depth perception in children.
Paul Kolker: The Dot Is In!… Shadows Of The Real — March 8 through April 27, 2012.