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.
How lucky I was recently to visit Peter Bonner’s studio, especially as I’d just seen his work at the Anita Schapolsky Gallery, where 6 of his paintings remain through Jan. 11. Peter is painting from the inside-out, not just in the structural sense we learned in art school for drawing the figure, but in a more psychological, search-for-the-essence sense. When I first discovered Peter’s art years ago, he was painting immense, mural-size canvases that seemed to hold everything he was thinking about – politics, relationships, the environment, history. He’s always tried to blend the human and landscape, to express that, despite our best efforts, we cannot remove our individual lives from the greater whole around us, and those earlier paintings, made in a passionate frenzy of painterly marks and imagery, seemed to encompass it all. The current work is much slower, contemplative, meditative, where the vastness of those huge spaces has been condensed into easel-size paintings of about 20x16 inches. But this smaller scale has not reduced the impact. Rather, it has focused the multiplicity of experiences from the lateral spread of the larger work into spatial layers of intimate introspection, searches for fundamental connections. Some paintings are pure paint, others include sand, rice paper or anything that can express meaning, as Peter has no censor, no rules except the rule to be truthful. He has even explored sculpting, as evidenced by figure pieces, twisted, caged in anguish, physical but pure emotion. Peter also draws, and apparently, during Covid Lockdown, he found himself waking up in the middle of the night, obsessively making graphite figural drawings, embodiments of the elusive yet still compelling resonance of dreams, and his current paintings aim to translate those ephemeral drawings into color and form. In some we still feel a ghostly figure, head, or animal, and in others, the figure has been submerged with its surroundings or turned into symbolic icon, but all result in the creation of presence, of time and memory made palpable and real.