The title Entropvisions is in homage to my mother, the poet and art critic, Harriet Zinnes. In 1990 New Directions published a collection of her poems titled Entropisms, a word she made-up combining entropy - the tendency toward disorder - and tropism - the growth towards or away from a stimulus. Similarly, my short reviews combine entropy and tropism by suggesting growth towards a vision of art from the chaos of the art world. Through the back door, my title also pays homage to my physicist father, Irving Zinnes, whose long discussions with my mom got her thinking about entropy and tropism in the first place.
The paintings of Heather Bause Rubinstein, now hanging at Ruttowski68 through Nov. 8, are large abstractions that morph landscape into what the artist calls “inscapes,” where emotion, memory and perception merge into the gestural experience of raw being. Often responding to her garden and walks in the woods around her upstate NY home, Heather creates paintings that are not observational per se but paintings that express a sense of place, the joy of the breeze or fear of the wind, of the brilliant sunlight that signals growth or threatening light forecasting storm. Her paintings suggest awe at life springing from primal earth, but also anguish from the destructive powers of climate change. Some paintings have specific sources, for instance those that grew directly out of the California wildfires, with their ferocious flames and devastating loss of life. Rather than see flames, however, we are confronted with the darkness of deep blacks hollowing out from below bursts of color that spurt and twist across the imposing canvases. We feel the cry of trees as they writhe and melt, and cry with them and with Heather, and with our world spiraling out of control. For years Heather worked with sewn fabrics and collaged painted books, but is now solely devoted to painting, a practice that has freed her to roam within and express to us an uncensored collision of paint, passion, landscape and social consciousness. Though she clearly loves artists such as Joan Mitchell and Bonnard, Heather lives in our time, and thinks not only about art and the healing beauty of nature but also society’s issues, about the environment, our propensity for senseless war and death, our inhumane treatment towards the poor and sick, the horrors of racism and other bigotries, and somehow, by being truthful to her personal complexities, has transformed landscapes into universal metaphors of internal wonder and angst. On Thurs., Oct. 23, from 6-8pm, she and her husband, the writer Raphael Rubinstein, will discuss her work at the gallery.