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.
Richard Pousette-Dart at Pace Gallery
2022.12.16
Closes
on Saturday! The Richard Pousette-Dart exhibition at Pace, up through
Dec. 17, is extraordinary, museum-quality extraordinary. With
paintings, sculpture, drawings, photography and journal entries mainly
from the 1950’s, this show gives a solid sense of the rich
inter-connections between the different media that Pousette-Dart
explored and the deep questions he asked. Seeing the sculpture, in
which solids are immersed in tangled webs and open voids, I more deeply understood
Pousette-Dart’s affinity towards the contrasts of open and closed, void
and solid, figurative allusion and pure abstraction. Using thick
layers of paint, sometimes beginning with complex colors, and then
overlaying these colors with what feels like sudden bursts of large
white splotches so only small hints of color poke out from beneath the
surface, Pousette-Dart achieves an inner glow and sheer spontaneous
openness of finding a balance between the subconscious creation of form
and more conscious construction of space.