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.
Despite – or maybe as a hopeful reaction to – the fearful cloud that weighs over our futures post January 20, the art of Jeffrey Bishop and Cathy Diamond now hanging at 490 Gallery emanates a sense of joy, and celebration of life. An improvisatory, eclectic and hands-on artist, Jeffrey combines the digital with analogue, computer-manipulated forms collaged and overlaid with free-flowing painterly marks. In this show, his paintings are displayed in contrasting pairs, with one painting showcasing an earthy, gravity-affected central form, and the other a more air-bound expanse of floating light and energy. Painted and assembled to the sounds of dissonant jazz, the shapes dance and turn, making oblique nods to physics, wind, underwater flows, perhaps extraterrestrial beings come to save us, or simply bursts of universal vitality. These paintings seem to say pure existence simply is, specific but unknowable. It is everywhere and everything, but at the same time, an elusive sensation of untouchable forces. Cathy Diamond’s recent paintings exude an openness, an optimism of life springing into more life, of biomorphic forms singing and growing in dialogue with each other, and with the air between them. A comparison between Cathy’s paintings at 490 and her recent October show at Lockwood Gallery suggests how she – and maybe all of us by extension – have been through a whirlwind of emotions these last months. Her Lockwood paintings, many made during the early days of the Gaza war, were taut and tightly condensed, crushed by a weight of anxiety and fear, by staccato forms jabbing at the space, and us. The 490 paintings have moved past that sudden shock of attack, as if, in order to survive the impossible, we must look to what is beautiful about nature, to its instinctive impulse to thrive. Also on exhibit are large, rhythmic paintings by Pamela Cardwell, suggestive of AbEx paintings moved into our present world. The exhibition is up through this Sunday, Dec. 15, with a closing party from 3-6pm.
@jeffrey_bishop @cathdiamond #alicezinnes @thelockwoodgallery1