Opsis I, 2012, digital pigment application on canvas, 38 x 58″
Courtesy of Algus Greenspon Gallery, New York
Opsis IV, 2012, digital pigment application on canvas, 38 x 58″
Courtesy of Algus Greenspon Gallery, New York
In my mind’s eye, I could see a glowing dot bouncing off a stale and unusually warm NYC spring art splash. Experiments in visual neuroscience pinned the interactive walls of the Algus Greenspon Gallery. On display, Hans Breder’s new time-based paintings seduced touring viewers to torque and spin wildly. Dancing around focal point singularities, the well lit high definition computer gradient images transformed the canvases into slick photopic experiences. Like in kirlian photography, these chromostereoptic paintings discharge aberrant coronal field emissions around image and image replicas. Interacting in mental space, moving “after images” of complementary red blue color dots dodged around and beyond the large canvases. This movement trigger’s photochemical sensitivities in the observer’s retinal cones. At this level of cone sensitivity, quantum possibilities create the myriad we vision. But where are the moving dot images we see? Certainly not on the canvas. In the skull there are no pictures, lights or plasma screens. Inside brain tissue there is only darkness. Independently without the act of observation, nobody would be there to excite the painting to leak and jump outside its own canvas level. In a sense, we bring the work of art to life. At that moment we get to peek into the subtle world, a negative space or parallel frame of reference. Our eyes fixate on density dots that have no residence. They pop in and out of existence. A phantom leak effect permeates the illusion of chroma shifting. When we gaze into an incandescent light, we experience a burn, a tracing glow effect in motion that bleaches the panoramic view. This stain effect is explained as gain changes that cause retinal sensitivity loss or opsin bleaching. This neural habituation tricks the mind to see what is not there. In chromostereopsis, mental aberrations contrast two dimensional RGB colors to create the illusion of motion and field depth.
During the European Renaissance, the new technique of foreshortening forced the 2 dimensional canvas to leak out of the frame. In a sense the viewer discovered abstractive space outside the object of reference. More than an innovative gimmick this new 3D experience enhanced the abstractions of mind. In foreshortening, the geometry of space stretches at a single vanishing point along the event horizon. Like in a singularity, infinity implodes on a finite system. It is well documented that the geometry of space bends as it approaches a point of singularity. At this point the fabric of space-time tears and collapses. Before the current expansion, the whole universe was squashed together in a point of infinite density. This suggests a black hole where time past, present and future entangled together. If we were able to observe a singularity we would see force fields creating epsilons around the dot density. This funnel that connects all planes is experientially implied in Mr. Breder’s new work.
One could say that the artist has allowed the experiencer to experience the unfolding of space. Like a dot, circumferences are consistent throughout the universe. At certain scales everything looks like dots spiraling scalar fields. We can presume that the universe’s predilection for sphericalness is because these forms are very stable shells. Circles and spheres can be extrapolated from dodecahedron permutations. The integrity of these closed boundaries suggests a negative force that must cancel out expansion. This negative vector geometry keeps the bubble from exploding. There is an omnipresent center that swallows itself. Like a mini black hole, light and space gets caught inside. Eventually this point becomes infinitely dense. Just like our sun will someday implode into its center to then explode a super nova. Some light does manage to escape, cools down and leaks cosmic fabric outside the density point. This celestial dust is the material world we experience as reality. There is only 5% of the universe that we can actually observe. The rest of it is either empty space or dark matter. The second law of thermodynamics says that the amount of energy necessary to create anything is less than the expended energy caught inside its precondition. At that point the vacuum collapses into a black hole forcing folding fields to spin and torque around a nucleus. Imagine you had a small object tied to a string that swung vigorously around you. Inscribing a perfect circle, the unity vectors centered at your hand become the force that keeps the rotating object from escaping on a tangent. Like the string connected to this object, all mass has a gravitational pull and attractor forces that connect non-local points of the vacuum. Through this connection, nothing is independent of anything else, and every elementary particle in the universe can be traced to the big bang moment of downward causation.
The object, like an electron appearing and disappearing in all possible locations, escapes the frame of reference. The work leaks out of the art shell, as in the foreshortened paintings of the renaissance, the experience of the viewer profoundly reformulates the artistic object; stretching the geometry of the canvas into mental space. Furthermore, if no one is watching there is nothing there. Illusions and tricks of the mind can misconstrue mental models of space. This is happening all the time in the conscious reality that we formulate. There is no detached observer. There is no evidence of a picture between our temples. Cones engage in photosensitivity for different wave lengths, and the brain organizes these signals in some kind of order, perhaps even quantum orders inside synoptical microtubules, like a “camera obscura” that flips the impression on a plate. This is the model we’ve been sold. The images we experience are really out there where they seem to be, in the geometry of consciousness. Yet as subjective conscientious creators we also seem to disturb the fabric of possibilities by simple observation, implying that we are linked to what we see. It appears that the experience of the seer is interactive both receiving and projecting information.
When the brain stops, mental space disappears; yet we continue seeing through non-local consciousness. Art has the capacity to dissociate brain from mind, it can trance you away from thinking. Like an altered state, the folding vortices force fields collapse the vacuum into nested black holes and our minds with it. There is no such thing as a detached observer. Could it be that Mr. Breder’s interface unlocks pulsating point field experiences in the act of observation? In this case the art piece only exists in the interaction of consciousness and brain. Not in the isolated closed system of the canvas. Consciousness is not a function of the brain but instead consciousness allows structures of the visual cortex to see. We can also see with our eyes closed and when we dream we imagine seeing. Perhaps consciousness is the universal dreamer that imagines a sentient seer, with the purpose of observing itself. Before there was somebody to observe, the universe, like these paintings was not there.
Carlos Cuellar Brown
