Saturday, January 17, 2009

Terry Winters "Knotted Graphs " at Matthew Marks








I went to Chelsea Friday , Jan. 9 to see a couple of galleries before going out to Williamsburg to revisit John Bjerklie's"When a River Changes Course" show. The shows I saw in Chelsea were Terry Winters at Matthew Marks and Nick Cave at Jack Shainman. First was Terry Winters show of paintings “Knotted Graphs”. I saw a review in the Times that morning and I was so attracted I couldn’t resist going to see them.I painted canvases with knotwork patterns in the 80’s. Mine were inspired by the knotwork in the Book of Kells and George Bain’s book
“Celtic Art the methods of construction”. When I look at Terry Winter’s paintings I see them as abstracted images from that same world and I feel euphoria to be amongst kin. The way they are painted with layers of translucent lake pigments is luscious. I ‘m disappointed though when I read the press release mentioning the study of topology (mathematics of continuous closed system curves i.e. mobius strip) as the inspiration for the paintings without mentioning the meaning behind
the use of the imagery as a metaphor for the interconnected nature of life. While at the gallery I spoke with the gallery attendant about the information in the press release and
after my mentioning the celtic knotwork he brought up parallel evolution; meaning Terry Winters could come up with the similar imagery through the use of mathematics without
having seen historical references. I left finding this hard to believe, since then I’ve read the interview in The Brooklyn Rail by Phong Bui


“Peter Lamborn Wilson: Quite recently, we were talking about Ireland
where we both have been and became obsessed with the stones. Does that
kind of monumental abstraction of the stones as they survive, not as we
might hypothesize them originally being, like the reconstruction of
Newgrange, which neither you nor I seem to care for, but the way they look,
denuded of the earth and in ruins, inspire your work in any specific way?
Winters: Not in any way that I would want to claim for myself, but I feel a
tremendous attraction to the development of that kind of abstract
language. A geometry that is rooted to its location as well as its relationship
to the given geology.
Wilson: It struck me that you could look on those stone structures in the
way they tie themselves into the landscape, which at times appear like a
topological puzzle.
Winters: Well, that reading of pattern making, which is tied to notions of
surveying both of the landscape as well as the cosmological movements of
planets and constellations, develops a structure that goes beyond
formalism. I think that’s been a challenge that I’ve applied to my own work,
that the work would become what Wallace Stevens called a ‘necessary
fiction’. That the paintings would be a product of exploration, an excavation
of factual material to reveal other levels of, I don’t want to say reality
—other possibilities.
David Levi Strauss: As Peter said, we are seeing these ancient Celtic
forms in ruins and it is this kind of deformation that I think is applicable to
some things that are happening in these new paintings.
Wilson: How so?
Levi Strauss: How forms once made and put in play break down over
time. Certainly, in the paintings in the front room that we were just looking
at, we’re seeing forms break, not necessarily into their constituent parts,

but to make new forms possible.”

I think I’m on the right track.

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