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.

Ron Milewicz at Elizabeth Harris
2024.5.22
Ron Milewicz transforms the bucolic trees and meadows behind his home in upstate NY into enchanted landscapes where fairies or elves might just be lurking behind the trees, sleeping until your eyes awaken them into your mind. These intimate paintings – most are about 9x12 inches – on view at Elizabeth Harris Gallery until May 25 – were made with slowly-applied thin layers of oil and sometimes egg tempera to create a luminous light, often glowing through hazy mists, that feels specific to time and season yet nevertheless timelessly living in a world of the imagination and dreams. Things never are quite what they purpose to be, but rather are participants in painterly visual metaphor and emotionally mysterious innuendo. Simplified trees become mythically animated creatures whose curved limbs reflect and in some ways merge with the curved paths, while their tree trunks, vacillating between being darkened shadows and brilliant lights, illuminate their surroundings in unworldly whispers of silent song. Negative shapes between tree limbs appear as magical second moons, shadows speak with ponds, and light, space and positive/negative shape interchangeably become one. These paintings, though done in the studio, are based on carefully observed drawings made from direct observations years ago, a time-lapse that gives Ron the freedom to stray from the dictates of the “real” world, to make changes that follow his internal rhythms, and to implant the language of memory and invention on to his landscapes of personal place. With the tonal armatures from drawings as structural scaffolds, the paintings can explore color, and so Ron adjusts with the subtlest of temperature shifts, ultimately translating each closely observed motif into a quiet meditation of fantasy and delight. These might be small paintings, but they have large auras of expansive possibilities as they enter in to their individual visions of Never Never Land.