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WWhy do we find beautiful things? To be honest, why do some paintings of colored dots in torn designs inspire me like a revelation? The idea that beauty is the feeling you get when you encounter truth is unusual in art, but it continues in science. A scientist Paul Dirac he once said that it is more important for a formula to be beautiful than it can be proven: when a perfectly beautiful theory produces results that cannot be true, he argued, then we should not abandon the theory but consider what is real.
Since the 1970s, Terry Winters he has been rebuilding that bridge between art and science. Drawing inspiration from disciplines including botany – his early paintings, in particular, evoke sprouting shells and twisted roots – engineering, based on computers and cybernetics, his paintings can be understood as simulations of the images that govern everything from the division of cells to the formation of stars. If every season must revise its standards of beauty to reflect a new understanding of how the world is made, then Winters comes as close to providing that example as any living artist.
The eight new functions take their titles from the language of geometry and mathematics: Area, Array, Field, Locus, Point, Scope, Sequence and Set. Each is made up of composite forms that attract each other from the form according to the invisible laws of attraction and repulsion. The field is obvious: on a sooty pink surface, a dense network of dusty blue cells folds inward like a trampoline under a bowling ball, while a cluster of large squares swells outward. The distortion of this pull is enhanced by the optical illusion, created by haloes of phosphorescent color around the blue, which makes them look like sculptures immersed in the paint. You have to climb up to make sure it is flat.
Point shows an area full of cells protruding from the center, as if a frog had been removed from a pond and placed under a paper-weight microscope. In succession, the disturbing pink storm passes through the yellow circle divided like a brain into hemispheres, while the terrible weather sweeps in from the right. In Scope, a symbolic arrangement of saltwater blues and desert oranges moves in a circular motion—within Leonardo’s square geometry. Vitruvian Man. Where the typical display of sacred geometries is quiet and calm, the patterns that run through Winters’ worlds are mysterious and mysterious. Here, a lot of importance is given to the obvious aspects of awareness and perception such as the principles of perception and field.
All this should not detract from the pure emotional pleasure provided by these images. In Locus, another clever trick seems to lift the edges of the red paint from the canvas like a wooden frame, and squeeze the circle at its center so that the outside balloon, threatening to burst. The same red cadmium, so sandy that the pigment seems not to be suspended in the oil, turns the carmine pockets into rocks that rise above Set. These movements of the hands evoke the movement of the world on Artin which systems are used to manipulate human emotions rather than reveal deeper truths. Which begs the question: is it all just a hoax?
There is magic in these works. Although Winters is often credited with extending the line of modern American art to the present, his works are in this sense pre-modern. In his rejection of the idea that art should be separated from science, it is similar to the Renaissance view in that painting is no more a tool for understanding the world than mathematics, and magic is just a name for things we do not understand. His commitment to creating diverse information, his expert commitment to material things, and his technical skills make him stand out in an environment that has recently been filled with chancers and fraudsters, traders and snake oil salesmen. That his work is enjoying a revival can be taken as an encouraging sign.
Dirac, luckily, was proven right. He developed a theory that was too beautiful to be wrong, even though it implied the existence of events that everyone agrees are impossible. He stood by his side, and after a few years, a man discovered the opposite of things. Winters’ paintings also provide a glimpse into the mysteries that underpin the world, and which science has yet to illuminate. That is to say, they are beautiful.
