Color As Language
There exist certain elements of painterly description which are so central to the rigor of artifice that they have flowed from one art form into all the rest, even into contemporary technology which allows us a further degree of reflection upon the idiosyncrasies of the natural world such as digital media. Such elements are so essential to the practice of art that we cannot imagine art not having them, nor a world that can be described without them. Most central among these is Color. Just to say the word itself is to speak volumes, while at the same time to be separated from adequate knowledge as needed to explore it's capacity for meaning. In the paintings of Dee Solin we encounter an obsessive engagement with color that operates in a stylistic milieu of painters like Julian Stanczak, Alfred Jensen, and Bridget Riley. Each of these artists attended to color and structure not as naturally opposed aspects of the same experiential, phenomenological universe, but as sections of a system qualified only by the idiosyncrasy of intuition.
Color is, in effect, the speculative order of the known universe. We cannot describe the world without it, and we cannot even imagine life without it either. We could allude to scale - we could even describe an object in minute detail, with exacting precision, but in the absence of color it would be nearly impossible to say Tree, Sky, or sea. Color in the abstract is something else altogether, for without the utility of verisimilitude, painting becomes more about making a statement, about exploring forms, giving rise to an innate dynamism, and in some way alluding to nature and the concrete or metaphysical elements by which it is organized. Artists such as Willem De Kooning, Bradley Walker-Tomlin, Paul Klee, and Wassily Kandinsky have accomplished similar constructions, in which the amassment of minute particulars, reduced in individuality yet vastly multiplied and organized around a formal or spacial concept that aptly describes how art contributes to the quality and variety of aesthetic experience. Beauty itself cannot be used to construct an entire universe, but it can aid us in achieving a more enlightened world view.
The new works mark a return to her early fascination with Wassily Kandinsky, whose paintings created a watershed moment in the history of abstraction; they were painterly and yet systematic, seeming to presage the technological advances that would provide the bases for chaos theory and mapping theorems, and at the very same time Kandinsky was also advancing intellectual concepts for the deployment of color in the arts, backed up by volumes of his own writing. Solin's newest paintings are not only inspired by Kandinsky, but I feel that they both evoke and fulfill his aims in the current era, which needs new accomplishments in the arena of painting. There is a prismatic quality in works such as "Yellow River Rocking", ""Stairway to Heaven" and "The Tempest", in which perspective collapses; like the idea in Cubism that one can actually turn a corner by folding the landscape while keeping still and looking very intently at the subject. How we look at the world becomes the world. Yet we know this is not the whole picture, just as we know that the earth recedes beyond the limit of our senses. Solin is showing us how color speculates while the rational mind does it's best to fill in the gaps of causal knowledge with phenomena of meaning. Color doesn't only take up space, it controls how we see and what we know.
Excerpts from an essay by Davis Gibson 2012