CONNECTICUT
John Arabolos: Fabric of Life…Investigation in Chaotic Symmetries
White Space Gallery • New Haven, CT • www.whitespacegallery.com
John Arabolos, Fabric of Life Series #2, Quadrant #1, digital print. |
The works of John Arabolos evince a full-blown dialectic between nature's implicit structures (cellular and organic, but randomly diverse and unique) and the artist's binary ones (grid-based, digital butterfly symmetries). The images Arabolos creates visually operate in the manner of a kaleidoscope, with repeating imagery hinged and mirrored in every possible inversion of the original motif. These motifs, the grist for his fractal geometries, are not retouched in any way. Their color remains scrupulously true to the original, as does his camera's recording of nature's randomness of form, with its evidence of growth, decay, and happenstance.
The perceptual rupture between the original images (which were available in a reference binder at a desk in the gallery) and the artist's extrapolations constitutes the heart of this exhibit. Without violating his base point-photos of desiccated and decomposing foliage, or lacy glimpses of branches against the sky-Arabolos constructs ephemeral abstractions that a viewer would be hard-pressed to recognize as taken from nature.
Arabolos manipulates his images with pristine regularity, handled domino-fashion in the matrix of x- and y-axes enabled by the computer. All relationships are linked by adjacencies; the designs weave across the checkerboard of his grid network's warp and woof. The unframed work presents its crystalline geometries on gleaming, perfect squares, laminated flawlessly onto aluminum-faced supports. These, too, float in silent, perfect squares in front of the gallery walls.
And there's the rub. Our experience of nature is perceptual, tactile, aromatic, three-dimensional. By flaying and quartering that experience, Arabolos has translated it into an icy lacework on a square grid. That which in nature is essentially dynamic, something in constant flux, is translated by perfect, unitary symmetry into something fixed and cerebral, into crystalline surface patterns as beautiful as a diamond, polished and suitable for display. The dialectic is an ancient one, its spirit essentially classical, centering on the distillation of the essential from the random. Still, one has to wonder if something is lost in the translation.
-Patricia Rosoff
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