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.
Charles Yuen at JJ Murphy
2024.9.17
Enigma. Intuition. Intellect. Texture. These words come to mind from the paintings of Charles Yuen, now hanging at JJ Murphy until Oct. 5. Yuen’s paintings ask for long viewing, to find their underlying content and discover their complex paint handling. Rather than clarify, however, the more scrutinized, the more questions without answers emerge, much as the meaning of life – perhaps the actual root of these paintings – seems forever unknowable. As John Yau eloquently writes in Hyperallergic, “Relying on an ever-expanding vocabulary culled from a wide range of sources, including Asian art, Persian miniatures, ornithology, cartoons, scientific diagrams, Op Art, and outsider art, Yuen assembles what I have come to think of as visual ideograms, complex possibilities whose ambiguous meanings reverberate.” But what are these reverberating meanings? Are they about the cosmic energy waves that weave through the paintings, much as they weave through all physical and non-physical substances, connecting us to the greater universe and to each other? Are they about the joy of painting itself, of creating new textures, new ways to manipulate and layer the paint? Are they about the stream of conscious meanderings of our inner brains? The surrealist connections we make as we dream and think? The ubiquitous but intangible energy and life forces impossible to grasp? How is it that, though the art provides no answers, it nevertheless is so clear in its belief in itself, and perhaps in us too? Much as his imagery flows from an intuitive inner psyche, Yuen’s strokes flow from a fluid and non-scripted process of making, creating thick, bumpy areas, scratched out and layered masses, patterned masses, and scumbled atmospheres, with scientific references to moiré patterns, energy waves, crystalline structures, molecules, as well as symbolic ladders, heads, insects. Why these images are together is the great mystery, but they seem to belong where they are, and together, with all their ambiguity, they seem to say a lot.