Bruce Pearson
Ronald Feldman

Where do language art and biology meet? Can they be seen to have a common root and might any one of the three exist in its particular form contingent only on the forms of the others? Art, one might say, would be impossible without language, which is predicated on biology. Art, another might argue, preceded language, both of which have become forces affecting biology. One place the three certainly meet is in Bruce Pearson’s paintings on display at Ronald Feldman Gallery.
For Pearson language is primary. He begins his now well-known Styrofoam reliefs by carving text—sentences and fragments that often double as the title for the piece—into the surface of the Styrofoam. These texts provide the impetus for the richly textured and colored surfaces that comprise his finished paintings, which is where biology comes in. The incessant caving gradually breaks the surfaces up into a network of interlaced planes that summon imagery of cellular proliferation and aerial views of geography, the latter reference intensified by the deeply pitted topography of the painting’s physical surface. The whole has a hallucinatory effect that, in this case, amounts to prismatic vision—the world seen through a turning crystal. Vision in Pearson’s paintings is rearranged into a new and beautiful symmetry of two unlikely orders: the mandala and the grid.
“Uncovering facts they would prefer you never hear about” a painting in sticky sweet primary and secondary colors employs the grid on a slight diagonal. Its evocative title is but a prelude to the thing itself, which, if you are not steady, may cause you to physically sway. Across the room is “A displaced game of cat and mouse,” which could derive from a picture of the planet seen from a pole, the fragmented land resolving itself into pattern. It is based on the mandala, its structure radiating from the painting’s center in golden yellow over blue and purple.
The grid and the mandala are two ostensibly opposed motifs. The grid is the field of power. It subsumes form and localizes power with the seer. The mandala centers power in the object. It is the fearsome face humankind gave nature to appease it. It radiates power and humans bow before it. It is not so much the wedding of these poles in Pearson’s painting that is strange as that wedding’s base in language. He seems to suggest that these perennial forms, on which artists have relied to give body to their visions for centuries, may be seen to have a root in the abstraction of language. So if one examines language with care, one might find in its structure forms analogous to those of art and science. There is, it would seem, a deeply rational root to Pearson’s art.
Or is there? Maybe we’re just being pushed through the looking glass into a world where our vision is so beautifully impaired that all things just seem one. In “Encyclopedia 3 (relative calm sounds of gunfire and footsteps sadly familiar sheds some light),” all trace of the underlying text has been eradicated and Pearson’s carving reaches an intermittent pitch of delicacy, like eddies in a stream. Its mooring in language comes undone, no rational underpinning can be found for this painting. Its colors seem never to repeat and one has the delicious feeling of having fallen into the rabbit hole for good.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES

True to Form: International Documentary Festival Amsterdam 2018
by Leo GoldsmithFEB 2019 | Film
Despite the rise of “creative nonfiction” across documentary production and exhibition over the last decade—at a glance, the “sensory turn” associated with Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, the recent vogue for hybrid films, growing interest in (largely non-narrative) VR docs, the proliferation of documentary forms in the gallery, and the prominence of a number of adventuresome film festivals such as FIDMarseille, Cinéma du Réel, Doclisboa, and the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Art of the Real—the narrative, character-driven documentary remains the most salable, at least in the North American market.

Figuring Forms
by Margaret WertheimDEC 17-JAN 18 | Critics Page
“To figure: to form or shape, to trace, to reckon or calculate, to represent in a diagram or picture, to ornament or adorn with a design or pattern.” Thus the Oxford English Dictionary defines the act of figuring, a word equally resonant in mathematics, science and art.

MAGDALENA ABAKANOWICZ:
Embodied Forms
by Jonelle Mannion
MAR 2018 | ArtSeen
Casts of dried mud dislodged whole from the body, or mummified fragments: Embodied Forms, the first exhibition dedicated to the work of Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz since her death last year at 86, welcomes us with arms, formed or partially formed up to the elbow, from resin-stiffened burlap (From the Anatomy Cycle: Anatomy 21, 29 & 32, 2009)

Annea Lockwood, Aki Onda, and Akio Suzuki: Presented by Blank Forms
by Andreas PetrossiantsNOV 2017 | Music
In March 2016, the newly-founded curatorial platform Blank Forms hosted their first event, a seminar on composer Maryanne Amacher’s investigations of the “psychoacoustic dimensions of human perception.”