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.
As we exit the Halloween season, we can stay just a bit longer in the land of demons with the exhibition of paintings by David Paulson now on view at Hands on Main (377 Main St., open Sat/Sun, 1-5pm) in Catskill, NY – and see interesting work by Peter Acheson as well. David’s paintings are some of the rawest paintings I have seen in a long time. They seem to have been born straight from the innermost cores of David’s psyche, letting us into the intense vulnerabilities we all feel at just being alive. Made with thick layers of gorgeous paint, scumbled, dug into and piled onto, these paintings travel past the Gates of Hell, and into the quagmire of ghostly nightmares lurking under so many of our social graces. They seem to break open our own protective shields as we explore their depths, and simultaneously wonder at their inventive paint handling. In the gallery’s outside windows is a double installation of small sculptures by Peter Acheson. These pieces take us out of our emotional hallucinations circling inside the gallery, and into our more conceptual artistic dialogues, with questions about what is high art, how much and what kind of technical skills are required by contemporary art, and just what do we mean by form anyway? Some pieces look like sensitive homages to Giacometti or Rodin, while others feel like simple hand-squeezes of clay that any child might do, but, shown together as equals in the display, they seem to mock the art world’s smug high-mindedness. On my trip to the gallery, I was lucky to also be invited into David’s studio, and so included in this post are photos of work not in the show. Beginning with his tortured sculpted heads and figures that act as guardians to his sacred space, these photos include drawings, works on paper, and of course more paintings – and a peak into the room as well.