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.
Cathy Diamond, Laurie Fader & Denise Sfraga at Lockwood
2024.10.9
The
paintings of Cathy Diamond, Laurie Fader and Denise Sfraga, curated by
Alan Goolman, and now showing at Lockwood Gallery through Oct. 20,
express a love of nature and a belief in art as metaphor, but here their
similarities end. Cathy’s early AbEx roots still lurk in her current
work, through its twisting forms and space, the all-over surfaces,
strong negative shapes, and linear meanderings. But Cathy’s are not
just abstract paintings. Often inspired by sensations and memories
of particular woods, trees, events, wildlife, even smells and the
invisible paths of insect flight patterns, Cathy transposes, and
transposes again, making forms dance in space as they morph from tree
into human being, emotions into paint, musical rhythms into art. Even
the crisis in the Middle East has found its way in, as spiraling within
the energy of the calligraphic marks are figures, here but not here,
overtaken by powerful worlds spinning around them. Laurie Fader comes
out of landscape painting, having made plein-air paintings for years.
But as the threat of climate change grew existential, as our political
system moved toward global collapse, the straight-forward landscape
seemed inadequate. Now, made from her imagination, Fader’s dystopian
landscapes, with their glowing light, biting colors, surprising size
shifts, flowers that grow into giants, and threatened yet happy
creatures, are contradictions of hope and despair, growth and decay,
fantasy and reality. Denise Sfraga spent years as a photographer and
photo editor searching for photos that told stories, but also years as a
gardener, and so it is that her recent work combines these passions,
with tightly composed compositions, singing color, and abstracted
portraits of flowers. Her flowers are magical flowers, single totems
suggesting not only flowers but spirit heads or beings from another
planet, balancing on their stems as they rise from below the canvas,
speaking to us directly about what it is to be a flower, about the awe
and joy of being alive, about the love of using color and creating
shape.