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.
Terry Winters at Matthew Marks
2024.6.3
I
myself am not a systems painter, and so I’ve rarely looked closely at
Terry Winters, an artist who is fascinated with systems, but this time I
decided to spend time and really look at the work in his current show,
now hanging at Matthew Marks Gallery,
through June 29. Not surprisingly, spending time paid off, for his
spaces opened-up, and started moving, oozing around and through
themselves, breathing a tension throughout the surfaces. Even his
humanity came through, as pure artistic decisions of subtle hue and
temperature changes, unexpected shape variations, and manipulations
between sharp, focused edges and fuzzy blurry ones exuded throughout the
fields. Winters came out of 1970’s Minimalism, and – especially after
discovering the impressive New Mexico landscape while assisting Walter
de Maria on an earthwork project – soon became interested in how dry
pigments and mark-making could suggest a non-representational spatial
illusionism. Eventually, Winters gravitated to the study of
mathematical and natural-world systems such as cybernetics, which is the
study of circular feedback systems where the end is also the beginning,
such as in ecological cycles, cognitive processes, and social
structures. This interest in cybernetics and, more specifically “point
cloud” 3-dimensional data-modeling, clearly manifests itself in Winters’
current work, but the large paintings and smaller drawings stand on
their own and create exciting visual worlds that will suck you in when
seen in person. Be sure to not only look from across the room, but
up-close to the large canvases and smaller works on paper too.