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.
Trevor Winkfield at Tibor de Nagy
2023.2.18
The Trevor Winkfield exhibition, curated by Andrew Arnot, and now hanging at Tibor de Nagy Gallery
through March 4, is a show of creative joy, of glorious color and
surprising juxtapositions. Objects with no clear conceptual connections
nevertheless connect without question because the formal construction
is so persuasively fine-tuned. Though having lived in NYC since 1969, Winkfield was
born in England, and looking at his whimsical juxtapositions of animated
non sequiturs, of stylized, perfectly-pitched
colored “elements” (as Winfield calls them), I suddenly thought of that
dry British humor of wordplay and fun. Winkfield’s paintings dance with
the excitement of finding the perfect color, the perfect shape, the
perfect form. He begins with colored paper collage, as a type of
thumbnail sketch and experimentation, discovering shapes and objects
through this visual play. Once clarified he then paints his perfect
constructions, hiding any reference to experiment, such that the
paintings feel they were born and must remain just as they are, waiting
to put a smile on your face when you walk in the gallery’s door.