Show your shadow Janus face
I am seeing these polarities assert themselves. No, don’t stop reading. Bear with me for just a bit.
What I mean is, there’s the background, which I think about as a kind of roiling atmospheric firmament, formless and void, darkness over the face of the deep, if you’re into that sort of thing. It conveys the appearance of randomness and chaos, free of much intent beyond activating the surface. (When I was studying printmaking in the 90s, I would turn copper plates face down and frisbee them across the parking lot behind the art building at CSU, trying for the same type of thing.)
Overlaying the firmament is the looping form, linked through color, but otherwise exhibiting a completely different dynamic from that of the underlying firmament. The looping form functions almost like a non-Euclidean coordinate system, such that it rationalizes the chaotic background, or let’s say, makes a story out of it. Reciprocally, the background affords the linear elements, the filaments, a space to inhabit, mediating their transition from the airlessness of a concept to something more substantive.
Concurrent with this order vs chaos polarity, there is another involving shallow vs deep space. Particularly in the paintings where the loop iterations proceed from dark to light, the darker versions read like shadows beneath the lighter ones, which consequently look like they are hovering fractions of an inch above the flat surface. But then, when you look through to the background, the gradients get subtle and the sense of space expands. So it feels both flat and vast. The flatness of signal in the vastness of noise.
Too much artspeak? Regret reading this far? Ok, well then just look. Sparkly.