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.

Joel Longenecker & Chuck Webster at Steven S. Powers and Joshua Lowenfels 
2024.10.28

On quick viewing, it makes no sense that the paintings of Chuck Webster and Joel Longeneckner hang together in one exhibition, but actually their conversations at Steven S. Powers and Joshua Lowenfels Gallery add context to each artist’s work. Chuck’s ambiguous but still concrete semi-representational imagery adds the suggestion of personal, evocative content to Joel’s art, and Joel’s corpuscular gobs of paint bring a sense of the painterly to Chuck’s. In fact, like Joel, Chuck is driven by paint handling, by the visual effects of thick oil paint scraped down, sometimes to the raw gesso, of layering and glazing, of form born from the process of making itself. In these relatively small paintings – Chuck also paints quite large – motifs take on multitudes of meanings, as they simultaneously reference some kind of thing, while refusing to say what that thing is. With humor and seriousness, with nods to popular culture and personal history, Chuck’s paintings, spanning nearly 30 years, ask us to join with him in letting go of preconceptions, to ponder memory, history and our current state of affairs. Joel’s paintings, on the other hand, are not metaphors, but rather recreations of the physical world, of the mountains, lakes, caverns and meadows that compose our landscape. Colors ooze from beneath and above other colors, as if paint were the molten lava of primordial volcanoes, and color the colored light of earth’s living existence. Joel lives among upstate NY farms, and some farmland itself has infiltrated these paintings, as in some we see plastic animals encased in the buildup of oil, hidden, but viewable with close looking. Joel also makes larger paintings that create imposing spaces of whole worlds, but even the smaller pieces in this show, some worked on for more than 10 years, are worlds within which we can walk, roam, and excavate the terrain. Both Chuck and Joel are in love with the magic of oil paint, with the miracle of paint’s translation into something both touchable and untouchable, and so we are lucky these works breathe in one space on the LES until Nov. 23. To see all 22 photos, as well as past reviews, go to Instagram link in bio at @entropvisions or www.alicezinnes.com/entropvisions--blog-