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.
Deborah Kahn at Bowery Gallery
2022.5.24
Another show I was glad to see before it closed last weekend was the Deborah Kahn exhibition at Bowery Gallery. I'm usually more drawn to loosely-handled paint, but Deborah's sheer perfection and enigmatic narrative mysteries had me transfixed. I felt a lot of Piero in her carefully constructed compositions, but the stories are pure Kahn. Birds, sometimes horses, and of course people are common, but what they suggest is not common. It is not our known reality, but some kind of hybrid between the real, the possible, the imagined, and a time-compression of now, past and even future. Whatever the meaning behind these paintings -- and perhaps there is no actual meaning -- the internal organization and phenomenal draftwmanship made me believe in them wholeheartedly.