Review by Terry Winters – Flashes of Magic in Patterns That Science Has Not Yet Explained | art

WWhy do we find things beautiful? More precisely, why do some paintings with colorful dots with wavy patterns inspire me with something like a revelation? The idea that beauty is the feeling you get when confronted with truth is unfashionable in the arts, but it endures in the sciences. The physicist Paul Dirac once suggested that the beauty of a formula was more important than its provability: when a perfectly beautiful theory produces results that cannot be true, he said, we should not ignore the theory but rather reconsider what is true.

Since the 1970s, Terry Winters has been rebuilding this bridge between art and science. Inspired by disciplines including botany—his early paintings, in particular, evoke sprouting pods and tangled roots—engineering, computer modeling, and cybernetics, his paintings can be understood as rough schematic approximations of the patterns that govern everything from cell division to star constellations. If every era must renew its standards of beauty to reflect new understandings of how the world is constructed, Winters comes as close to presenting this model as any living painter.

These eight new works take their titles from the language of geometry and mathematics: Area, Matrix, Field, Position, Point, Range, Sequence, and Set. Each consists of overlapping patterns that pull each other out of shape according to the invisible laws of attraction and repulsion. The field is telling: On a pink ground, a dense grid of dusty blue cells curves inward like a trampoline under a bowling ball, while a criss-crossing arrangement of larger circles bulges outward. The disorienting effect of this push and pull is amplified by the optical illusion, created by jagged, phosphorescent orange halos around the blue circles, making them look like sunken craters in the paint peel. You have to climb onto the roof to make sure it is flat.

The dot shows a crowded landscape with cells bulging outward in the center, as if frog froth had been plucked from a pond and placed under a microscope paperweight. In Sequence, a storm of pink interference races across a yellow circle that divides like a brain into hemispheres, while a mysterious weather system sweeps in from the right. In the scale painting, mysterious symbolic arrangements of freshwater desert blue and orange nodules move through the circle-within-a-square geometry familiar to Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man. Where this famous display of sacred geometry exudes stillness and tranquility, the systems that operate across Winters’ worlds are wild and strange. Here, great importance is given to subjective factors of perception and consciousness such as objective principles of logic and proportion.

All this should not distract from the pure sensual pleasure that these images provide. In Locus, another optical illusion seems to lift the red edge of the painting off the canvas like a clumsy wooden frame, pressing down on the ball with holes in its center so that it bulges outward, threatening to burst. The same cadmium red, so sandy that the pigment appears barely suspended in oil, transforms pockets of crimson into rock formations that climb up the surface of Set. These tricks evoke the more secular movement of fine art, where patterns are manipulated to exploit the idiosyncrasies of human perception rather than to reveal deeper truths. Which begs the question: Is this all just a magic trick?

There is something magical about these works. Although Winters is generally credited with extending the lineage of American modernist painting to the present, his practice is in this sense pre-modern. In rejecting the idea of ​​separating art from science, he resembles the Renaissance position that drawing is no less important than mathematics in understanding the world, and that magic is just a name for things we do not yet understand. His commitment to the synthesis of diverse fields of knowledge, his chemical commitment to materials, and sheer technical ability certainly set him apart in a scene recently inundated with charlatans, charlatans, trolleybusters and snake-oil salesmen. That his business is enjoying a revival can be seen as an encouraging sign.

Incidentally, Dirac was proven right. He formulated a theory that was too beautiful to be wrong, even though it implied the existence of phenomena that everyone agreed were impossible. He stuck with it, and a few years later, someone else discovered antimatter. Winters’s paintings also offer a glimpse of those secret patterns that underlie the physical world, and which science has not yet shed light on. This means they are beautiful.