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.
"To sense the invisible and to be able to create it — that is art". This quote by Hans Hoffman lives in Ro Lohin’s current paintings, now of view at the Union Art Gallery, Wagner College in Staten Island through April 17. Walking into the gallery of large, almost entirely black and white paintings is walking into a world where the tangible dissolves into pure consciousness, and the experience of observational painting becomes a journey into the elusive. Ro has developed an idiosyncratic method of applying paint, reminiscent of Pollock’s drip painting technique and Seurat’s slow accumulation of dots, that translates the ordinariness of a forest into a majestic experience of becoming, unbecoming and becoming again. Painting on-site and with thinned oil paint she splatters black and white paint with an exacting dexterity that creates the light of color and specifics of drawing while simultaneously engulfing these specifics in an amorphous galaxy of pure beingness. In one painting, pentimenti of an older painting lying underneath show through, expressing fugitive hints of color so faint yet so clear that the viewer can’t be sure whether the marks are real or optical illusions of peripheral vision. And in a nearby painting, the slightly warm raw canvas contrasts with the cool painted grays to again create a mirage of flickering color. I have known Ro since we were students at the NY Studio School, and at that time she painted fairly straight-forward landscapes, always perfectly articulated and with a sharp sense of light and dark. And she drew. She drew members of her family and her circle of friends, and even at her young age was able to penetrate their psyches with the black and white of charcoal on paper. Ro is a magician of the black and white, a transmogrifier of nature’s energy into visual form, a courageous sojourner into the very essence of metaphysical life. Give yourself the pleasure of the invigorating ferry ride, take the shuttle that then goes directly to the gallery, and quietly meditate with the unknowable-made-known that is Ro Lohin’s art.