FROM THE BOOK OF LIGHT AND COLOR(4)

Zohar 1 15a;
In the beginning--When the will of the King
began to take effect, he engraved signs into the heavenly sphere.
Within the most hidden recess a dark flame issued from the
mystery of AIN SOF...neither white or black, neither red
or green, of no color whatever. Only after this flame began
to assume size and dimension, did it produce radiant color.
From the innermost center of the flames sprang forth a
well out of which colors issued and spread upon everything
beneath...It could not be recognized at all until a
hidden supernal point shone forth...the primal center
is the inmost light, of translucence, subtlety, and
purity beyond comprehension...Beyond this point
nothing can be known. Therefore it is called
Raishett, beginning...
(trans. Scholem)

POSTCARD:CLIFF HOUSE 2

STUPID LUDWIG

"If a blind man were to ask me "Have you got two hands?"
I should not make sure by looking. If I were to have
any doubt of it, then I don't know why I would trust my
eyes. For why shouldn't I trust my eyes by looking to
find out whether I see my two hands? What is to be tested
by what? (Who decides what stands fast?)
"And what does it mean to say that such and such stands
fast?" ( Wittgenstein:On Certainty)

MY MORNING FOR BOUVARD ET PECUCHET

Advertisement boredom

Ad Hominem Boredom:You are who I categorize you as being,and fall into that category by the name I apply to you, individually or by demographic group,because its good for my numbers

Anthemic boredom:getting misty-eyed whilst pledging allegiance to the crowd one is standing amongst; "uplift"; "Amazing Grace" sung in sports arenas; the general view of human relationships as portrayed on television; the transcendence of barbarity or death via sentimental denial.

Antinomian boredom, or the marital indiscretions of the Elect

Anime boredom:the appalling unsurprise of discovering oneself to be a robot

Apocalypse boredom:there are those for whom a certain sense of anticlimax attends the subject

Avant-garde boredom:being shocking with the same shocking things as last year; being shocked by these things.

Boredom of the Blurb:reading them, one thinks:were this so, the dead would be raised

Boredom of Hyperbole: Whosoever opens a dry-cleaning business is a "visionary". Every business plan is a Vision. The search for capital is a Vision Quest.

Boredom of the Machine: In Science Fiction the Robots invade. In reality, we are subjected to the POS system, the computer screen, the television, and the automobile. As the late Guy Davenport put it, we have automobiles for bodies and televisions for minds. The boredom of the machine conceals the unequal struggle not to be dominated by our machinery. The degree to which this struggle is unequal can be calibrated by the number of people who worship their automobile and believe that the characters of a sitcom are their boon companions.

Buddy Movie Boredom

Capitalist boredom:who do you exclude from your gated community? and which of your possessions loves you best?

Communist boredom:the same as Evangelical boredom, with a tractor instead of an automobile as the Golden Calf

Corporate Boredom:What is good for us is good for you and here is the Anthem to prove it.

Country Music Boredom

Determinant Discourse Boredom:a disability of ad hominem boredom, corporate boredom, capitalist boredom, and communist boredom

Futurological boredom:an accurate weather forecast would encourage guarded trust

Interior Decorator Boredom:intense concentration on the subject of finials

Jane Austen or Booker Prize Boredom:you're a member of our civilized club armpatch

Prayer Breakfast Boredom

Pundit Boredom

Pornography boredom:the visual dominance of a tactile medium

Public Speech boredom:each additional moment proportionately lessens its value

Metalinguistic boredom:or the inability not to speak jargon following ndoctrination

Metanovelistic boredom: time invested to the point of indoctrination due to length of text

Minimalist boredom:folding that futon just so

memoir boredom

Nobel Laureate Boredom:what I come to say when I think, "the World will listen now."

Networking Boredom and its cyber-adjunct, Social-media networking boredom

Orgy Boredom:somehow it's always the dwarf who is the master of ceremonies

Rebellious denim boredom

Science Fiction Apparatus Boredom

Serial killer boredom

Small vegetable and free-range chicken boredom

Spectacle Boredom: car chase scenes; helicopter explosions;championship wrestling, military parades and religious processions

Spy Boredom:unhappy spies, conflicted spies, spies with amnesia but gymnastic skills

Solipsistic boredom:the belief that perception is factual because it's my/ your own

Superhero boredom:always some erotic glitch

Triumphalist Boredom:Albert Speer designs the set for the Star Wars Ballet to the Alpine Symphony at Disneyland Nurenburg

Titanic Theme Liebestod Boredom:the beauty of those vows of love beyond the grave is in how little wear they entail

Traffic Boredom

Waiting Room Boredom

Water Filter Sales Pitch Boredom;or Vacuum-cleaner feature indoctrination boredom

Wholesome boredom:or conception without lose of virginity as a means of reproduction for the general public


Unsolicited boredom :the only kind

POSTCARD:THE ANAMORPHIC SKULL

from

Holbein's

THE

AMBASSADORS

in the National

Gallery in London;

I have a copy on my desk.

IN PRAISE OF SHADOWS

IN PRAISE OF SHADOWS
Talking years ago with the late Jessica Mitford on her bungalow porch in Oakland, I discovered that she,too, thought the motel journey in Nabokov's Lolita took half the book. It takes seven pages. This is due to Nabokov's magicianly art, which gives narrative heft in the form of memorable details keenly observed and put. W.G.Sebald's spiralling tangents have a similiar effect. And here is Tanizaki's IN PRAISE OF SHADOWS, merely twenty five pages long. I had thought it the length of a short novel. This is thanks to its implications.
It is a study in contrast between the old ways of Japan and their rapid transformation--or destruction--because of westernization. Shiny surfaces,electrical lights and their garish relationship to the traditional Shoji screen,the glaring white porcelain western toilet, the electrical fan, all are subjects of Tanizaki's eloquent grumbling.He misses the patinas of darkness, the way shadows overlap and deepen in niches,textures polished by handling but otherwise unadorned. Japanese buildings seem like umbrellas to him, their roofs spread out beyond their walls to protect their inhabitants from rain; western buildings seemed to him like towers with caps. All around--for he is an inveterate nostalgist--he sees mindfulness sacrificed to efficiency, textures to legibility, and the resonance of shadows banished from brightly impersonal hospital-like modern dwellings.
The spell of Tanizaki' is such that on finishing his essay one wants immediately to turn off the lights.This is where it is newly relevant.I remember a snowfall of five years ago which put out our electricity for almost a week. We immediately entered an older rhythm, a candlelite rhythm, and woke at the crack of dawn. When the electricity came back on ,it was with a great deal of noise. The television was like the announcement of a perpetual catastrophe. The look of a light-flooded room at midnight seemed suddenly un-natural. The items of nostalgia for Tanizaki may be specifically Japanese but the sensation is universal. It is nostalgia for nature.
That emptiness, the abscence of technology, the prescence of shadows or darkness ,might become the ne plus ultra of luxury is something Tanizaki implies throughout.If only the rich can afford NOT to have cell phones, he is right, of course. And near-emptiness has already proven to be a commodity over the last forty years:think of the prices a Mondrian, a Rothko, an early Brice Marden or a Yves Klein monochrome, a Robert Ryman white painting--not to mention a Malevitch!--command. The larger the population,greater the premium on emptiness.
Darkness, likewise, becomes a matter of inverse de luxe in Tanizaki, finding its ultimate expression in the ever-dark alcove of a windowless room through which falls, never-the-less,the faintest tinge of light through its walls of rice paper. This brings to mind James Turrell's beautiful early installations, literally large rectangular holes in the walls, faintly lit themselves by very indirect illumination. Turrell had seemingly found the exact degree of dimness at which the human retina starts to scintillate, for this wall-space seemed both deeper than it was, and visually active, active with the apparition of something nebulous nearly but never to take form.It recalled Proust's phrase, "the kaleidoscope of darkness".
Troy Brauntuch's paintings, which are given wide currency right now, do this differently.They are representations of, say, a stack of shirts depicted as under a light so dim as to be near darkness.The eye adjusts accordingly, in stages in viewing a Brauntuch...as it does in life.What he offers us is the great luxury of being able to reach for the subject matter when almost everything else grabs at us. The problem of darkness is converted to the pleasure of re-searching it.

Shadows, too, are increasingly present in our art,after having been almost entirely banished from the hard bright art of the 'sixties.Virtuoso shadowcasters could be nominated from a number of approaches, hugely different, the celestial mechanics of an Eliasson casting shadows of a different genre from the shadows cast by the trellised structures of Christina Iglesias.Some of the best, and least known,work of Andy Warhol is his shadow-paintings;his shadows slice the field of the canvas much like the anamorphic death's head in Holbein'sAmbassadors does, and for similiar reasons. Warhol's shadow is a reminder he must die and that he still remains; it is an integral part of making something fleeting permanent----more permanent than one's own fleeting self.

Perhaps we, the public, will become connoiseurs of shadows, too, fleeing neon glare for retinal quietude. The greatest rebellion in a culture which demands more efficiency is to grow slower. The antidote to hyper-information is silence. The nuances sacrificed for impact take a life of their own. Tanizaki 's essay, meanwhile, also reminds us that our interest in the fleeting, the immaterial, the shadowy, the near-minimal,the pregnantly empty, and voidness,began not with phenomenology, or its adjunct, minimalism, but in the concious poverty of Zen Buddhism, and the generative emptiness of the Tao.

(painting by Troy Brauntuch)

A BOOK OF LIGHT AND COLOR (3)

"...I am aware of something in myself, like light
dancing before my soul, and if it could be brought
out with perfect steadiness, it would surely be
life eternal. It hides and then again it shows.
It comes like a thief, as if it would steal everything
from the soul. But since it shows itself and draws
attention, it must want to allure the soul, and
make the soul follow it, to rob the soul of itself."
(Meister Eckhardt quoting Saint Augustine)

"God is the light of the heavens and earth.
The likeness of His Light is as a niche
where a lamp burns--
the lamp in a glass and the glass, as it were,
a star of brilliance.
The lamp is kindled from a blessed Tree
an Olive neither of the east or of the west
the oil of which is almost incandescent by itself
without the touch of fire, Light upon Light.
God guides to His Light whom He will."
(Qur'an:Surah 24:35)

POSTCARD:CLIFF HOUSE

THREE BLUE POEMS

....the more south we were, the more deep a sky it seemed,
till, in the Valley of Mexico, I thought it held back an element
too strong for life, and that flamy brilliance of blue
stood off this menace and sometimes, like a sheath or
silky membrane showed the weight it held in sags.
Saul Bellow:from the Adventures
of Augie March


...and Bluebeard's Tower above the coral reefs,
the magic mousetrap closing on all points of the compass,
capping like petrified surf the furious azure of the bay,
where there is no dust and life is like a lemon-leaf,
a green piece of tough translucent parchment,
where the crimson, the copper, and the Chinese
vermillion of the poincianas
set fire to the masonry and turquoise blues refute the clock...
Marianne Moore:from
"People's Surroundings"


Turn blue on fast and it becomes purple; turn
purple on fast and it becomes black. Slow down
blue to get grey. Slow down grey to get white.
Blue is half-way between white and black; fulcrum
of light, hinge of darkness.
Malcolm de Chazal:from Sens Plastique

DREAMS OF STAIRS

Should you be able to negotiate the outer walls of the tower
which have fallen haphazardly where they were pulled down and after
generations are overgrown, resembling the quarry which they
came from,
you would first traverse the outercourt, its paving stones
now split with bramble, thorns,
and then the chapel,
its ecclestiascal character preserved somehow,
though the famous stained glass windows
were shattered by catapaults
and such stones as the invaders --their victory complete--
could throw.
Finally you would come to the Keep,
its spiral stairs ruined, too,
difficult to climb in the dark,
and should you ascend
find the abscence of illumination seemingly final,
though thickening with each step,
compelling you to touch each step,
orienting yourself via the wall.
The stone is cold and cracked,
sometimes damp,
sometimes covered with moss or rough herbs
which you imagine--though it is impossible to perceive--
as albino.
As if it is a well you descend
rather than stairs you climb.
Your problems, moreover, multiply in this ascent
due to the uneven-ness of the steps, some wide and flat
some broken off so that your feeling hand
touches empty space, a drop, before discovering
the narrow margin you might rest upon
in order to continue
a necessity now as
much like a childhood dream
quite forgotten until the event
proves it premonitional
the steps behind have begun to disappear,
quite soundlessly at first,
but proven empirically true by your attempt to back track,
a wafture of cold air
such as is felt from a gorge of unprecedented depth
touching your face,
a pebble falling then
as if to illustrate that is is an empy space
it falls to
by making no sound for
five six seven heartbeats
before it hits the floor.
You have no time to exclaim
as the ledge on which you balance
begins to evaporate
and now your climb is a matter of haste
instinctual self-preservation granting at last
dim sight of a ladder at the parapet
barely nailed together,
a rung wrenched by your hand,
yet your sole means of escape.
Climbing with more agility
than you have shown in years,
you hoist yourself up
and notice the Castle Keep some great distance below,
half-disguised by cloud,
and yourself parallel to some faint star.

THE BOOK OF LIGHT AND COLOR (2)

LEONARDO:


The air is full of infinite, straight, radiant lines crossing without ever entering
the path of one another, and they represent for each object the true form of
its cause.


WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS:


A course in mathematics would not be wasted on a poet, or a reader of poetry,
if he remembers no more from it than the geometrical principle of the
intersection of loci:from all angles lines converging and crossing establish
points. He might carry it further and say that in his imagination apprehension
perforates at places, through to understanding--as white is at the intersection of
blue and green and yellow and red. It is this white light that is the background
of all good work-- (from Williams' essay on Marianne Moore)


GUY DAVENPORT


It is...electrochemical energy in brain cells derived from photosynthetic sugar
in vegetables whereby we can see a star at all, and the fire of the star which
we call the sun thus arranged that it could be seen and thought of by the
nourishing brain. Is that system closed? Did the sun grow the tree that
made the paper that you are holding, and in the ink on it, so that it can read
this book with your eyes?


(from Davenport's essay on the poet Ronald Johnson)

AGNES MARTIN:

PAUL KLEE:WHITE IN WHITE

DREAM
I find
my house empty
Gone
All the wine

The river
diverted
Stolen
my naked joy

Eradicated
the epitaph
White
in white.
(trans. Anselm Hollo)

JOE MANGRUM

Watching the Tibetan monks meticulously construct a mandala made of powder of malachite, granulated lapis lazuli,topaz ,and other rare gems and minerals was an education.The technique involved spooning these powdered gemstones into a horn-shaped receptacle with a narrow spout from which these ingredients fell grain by grain. This naturally was done to the recitation of sutras.

The mandala they were constructing from particles of sand was the Kalachakra mandala. To briefly synopsize its iconography would require starting from the center with Kalachakra, multi-armed,and his consort deity, Vishvamata, the eight female deities surrounding them, copulating deities in the second enclosure--the males with three heads and six arms-- and so forth down through the fifth and outermost level.An inventory of the subsidiary deities gyrating in their own wheel of enlightenment or their own mandorla would take a page.

I went to view the monks--who were performing this ritual at the Museum of Natural History in 1988--a number of times,which was possible as it took two months to construct.On one such visit I spied someone among the novice monks who I had last seen a decade before shooting up with one of Warhol's lesser superstars. But I was not present when the mandala was taken to a pier, and there with ritual prayers dispersed into the river.

A Process such as this as this may seem remote from the concerns of a contemporary artist but appears to be at the root of Joe Mangrum's work. He has been making mandalas with his own toys and with his own methods since the mid-nineties. The word "toys" is accurate, as these include plastic soldiers and jungle animals. He has also used bullets,and compact disks.Also, in his more perishable altars, the petals of flowers such as Jane Magnolias, Birds of Paradise, or Heliconias from New Zealand.Stupa-like forms uphold these objects as well as sea-shells,twigs,twine, crepe banners, prayer flags, etcetera. Symmetry anchors this profusion. Somewhat.

His basic formats are not really western but the grids from which the Hindu forms are extrapolated. This is one of the few times that they have been used successfully by a western artist that I know.(The other instances,paradoxically,are in ' minimalists' generations and continents apart, in Malevitch, Ad Reinhart,Sol Lewitt, and by remotest retinal suggestion Agnes Martin.)

There are altars for ecological causes, against war, and for world peace. I don't regard their idealism as stupid, but as a dire need.

Lately, Mangrum has been making sand-paintings throughout Manhattan,twenty-two at last count.The colors are idioretinal, as in a Huichole yarn painting, or a Van Gogh, the forms wheelswithin wheels rather than mandalas.They share the quality of construction via reiterated prayer with his earlier work. He takes the altar-making process to the street.It's a blessing.

SCISSORING:MARK FOX AND CHRIS NATROP

Somewhere between the flat and the crooked is the scissored,somewhere between drawing and sculpture,a step that more or less skips painting. The material is paper, cardboard, mylar aspiring to the condition of lace, string,twine,or rope which can be straight , or curved,or knotted and tangled. Scissored imagery often uses the symmetry of the fold- and- cut process and then slices it, crumples it or tears it into a thousand pieces and reassembles it in a flurry. The space that such artifacts occupy is not painting space or sculptural spaceor enigmatic conceptual altar space. It feels like gesture space--the big abstract expression-ist swatch of a loaded brush of paint across canvas, but in this case across the whole room and in this case in a stroke which proves to be made of meticulously wrought fragments.

Two virtuosi of this process are Mark Fox, who shows at Larisa Goldston, and Chris Natrop,based in L.A. They are more like each other than they are like anyone else, but no more like each other than were Pollock and De Kooning. Fox tends to work towards a tornado-like centrifugal motion.Natrop tends to make constructions which may be leisurely walked through, a jungle of opaque and semi-transparent pieces and their complicated shadows. If speed were an attribute, one might say that Fox slings his imagery faster, Natrop more slowly--but of course this is absurd. It is simply that installation art is evolving its own time-sense,its own musicality, and this is something for which there is as yet more gesture, more pointing-towards, than legitimate vocabulary.

Fox's largest statement to date is DUST, which though not completely characteristic of his technique(s),is certainly a testament to his skill. Over a period of two years he made a painstaking reconstruction of every object that he owned as a paper cut-out facsimile which he then hung as if spiralling away in a tornado. Each of these cut-outs was painted toxic green from below in memory of the green underside of a tornado he saw as a child.It combines pedantic detail with wild centrifigal motion.It is the epitome of re-assembly through fragmentation.

It feels like a piece by James Surls done almost thirty years ago, which was a tree-sized sculpture made of an actual tree depicting a tree under possession suspended as if swirling with each of its branches transformed into a wielded axe. No formal relationship, in truth , save for this sense of churning centrifugal motion, and the sense that both conjure the storm.

Other of Fox's work is in the vein of urban ghost-making, floating paper constructions hyper-filigreed and drawn upon with the delicacy of etching. He will sometimes festoon these over sawhorses, which seems to be his muse- among- objects as the apple was Cezanne's. He also makes creatures threatening and/or forlorn.His earliest work was as a puppeteer--he won a Jim Hinson award for his work in theater. I envy those who have seen it.

Natrop's big pieces have the quality of painterliness in their use of swatches and washes of color,the quality of sculpture in its orchestration of shadows. Why it feels like a rainy day Vuillard or Bonnard eludes me, but it does.Natrop's smaller work--even those pieces 96 inches high--has an exquisiteness which is neither twee or precious due to the formal demands he makes on himself, which are far more varied than the mere turning out of prettiness on a lathe.The components add up.They seem to broach some near- moment when a shadow transforms into a silhouette or illustration. Almost and never quite yet.

Installation art has entered a period where it discorporates and re-integrates space in ways previously unknown. It is as if baroque alterpieces had volunteered to de-construct themselves as a ballet, as if the decor of Ravel's opera L'enfant en la Sortilege, with its lamenting wallpaper, cantankerous arm-chair, and coloratura fire were normal home furnishings.Some new relationship between sculpture and architecture is being worked out. Some of the best of this makes scissors and paper rock.

(Illustrations one and two are by Mark Fox, the second from Dust, which was installed

at Rice University in Texas; three and four

are by Chris Natrop; five is a reiteration

of Fox . Videos of the work of both

can be seen on the web.)

A BOOK ON LIGHT AND COLOR (1)

A BOOK OF LIGHT AND COLOR (1)(foreword)These are my gleanings on the subject of light and color from a period where I had no studio, and consequently was unable to paint. It was a difficult period and I divertedmyself by compiling an anthology of the texts on light and color which I liked the best. It soon became evident that our perception of light pervades our use of language to a degree which makes the idea of compiling a comprehensive work on the subject ridiculous. I am seldom deterred from the ridiculous, however, especially when such a project allowed me to vision and envision.
Several authors have assayed something similiar. By far the best, in my opinion, are Alexander Theroux's The Primary Colors, and its companion volume, The Secondary Colors. Both immerse the reader as if they are being dipped in red blue yellow et al. To read each was to become this or that color for a time--a novel experience, almost out of L.Frank Baum. I was delighted,I admit, to find that we cited different texts. Richard Feynmann's QED, on the physics of light, is a masterwork of plain-ness making intricacy clear.I discussed this project with only two or three people, primarily the poet Ronald Johnson,now dead, whose poems are a hidden glory of literature--particularly his long sequence ARK,which I feel is a psalm of the future. It is to his memory that I dedicate these notes,scattered as they are.

ORIGINS
"In the beginning, God created the Heaven and the Earth,And the earth was without form and voidand the darkness was upon the face of the deepand the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the watersAnd God said, Let there be light; and there was light.And God saw the light, that it was good;and God divided the light from the darkness,And God called the light Day and the darkness He called NightAnd the evening and the morning were the first day." (Genesis 1-5 in the King James Version)
"In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the word was God,The same was in the beginning with God All things were made by him and without him was not anything made that was made.In Him was life and the life was the light of men, And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehendeth it not. (The Gospel of St. John 1-5 in the King James version)
AKNATON'S HYMN TO THE SUN
Creator of germ in woman,maker of seed in man,giving life to the son in the body of his mothersoothing him that he may not weep,nurse even in the wombgiver of breath to animate everyone that he maketh! ...How manifold are thy works!They are hidden from before us O sole God, whose powers no other possesseth.Thou did create the earth according to thy heart. (14 century BC)
FROM THE CHANDOGYA UPANISHAD
There is a light that shines beyond all things on earth,beyond us all, beyond the heavens,beyond the highest, the very highest heavens;this is the light that shines in our heart.All the universe is in truth Brahman. He is thebeginning and end in life of all. As such,in silence, give unto Him adoration.There is a spirit that is mind and life, lightand truth and vast space. He unfolds the whole universeand in silence is loving all.This is the spirit that is in my heart, smallerthan a grain of mustard seed, greater than the earth,greater than the heavens, greater than all those worlds.He contains all works and desires,all perfumes and tastes.This is the spirit in my heart. This is Brahman.To Him I shall come when I go beyond this life.And to Him will come he who has faith and doubts not. (800 BC)

ALMOST WITHOUT WORDS

The first two images are of the work of Richard Greaves, the anarchitect, who
has built a community of salvaged-material structures in the wilds of Canada;
the photos were taken by Mario del Curto, and shown at Andrew Edlin gallery.
The third is one of Adam Cvijanovic's gigantic paintings, formerly shown @
the now defunct Bellwether gallery. Images four and five are by the admirable
Ben Grasso, who is based in Brooklyn. Six and Seven are also by Richard Greaves.
(Parenthetically, I would like to observe that both Cvijanovic's and Grasso's
paintings were done well before the housing-foreclosure crisis, and consequently there
is a case for regarding them as prescient, if not prophetic.)

F.SCOTT DOES RIMBAUD

From the French of Arthur Rimbaud
VOYELLES
A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue, vowels,
Someday I'll tell you where your genesis lies;
A--black velvet swarms of flies
Buzzing abpve the stench of voided bowels,
A gulf of shadow; E--where the iceberg rushes,
White mists, tents, kings, shady strips;
I --purple spilt blood, laughter of sweet lips,
In anger--or the penitence of lushes;
U--cycle of time, rhythm of the seas,
Peace of the paws of animals and wrinkles
on scholars ' brows, strident tinkles;
O --the supreme trumpet note, peace
Of the spheres, of the angels. O equals
X-ray of her eyes; it equals sex
(translated by F.Scott Fitzgerald)

DEAN BYINGTON

The images of heavenly choirs received by the Abbess Hildegarde von Bingen are much the same images reported by sufferers of migraines according to Oliver Sacks.

When Leonardo wrote of being able to see fantastical shapes in the stains on a wall which had been much-spat upon, he was pointing to a basic facultyof the mind, says Valery:its tendacy to scrawl monsters on the margins of pages.It is as if we have an image-making device, the opposite of a screen-saver, which begins to doodle whenever a lecture gets dull. This faculty is related to but not synonymous with an eidetic mechanism, the talent of finding forms and faces, even illustrations, among patterns--such as those made by foliage--or shapes, such as those of clouds.

According to the art dealer Ron Feldman, Leonardo habitually concealed anamorphic imagery or visual puns throughout his paintings.This sounds right, but is hard to honestly confirm once one's own eidetic impulses have been triggered. Once we have started decoding hidden faces we will find hidden faces whether or not they are to befound. The great Safavid dynasty master of the miniature, Sultan Muhammed, hid them in the rock-work throughout his masterpiece, The Court of Gayumars, but though I have tried to locate each of them there remains a question between what I am actually seeing and what I think I see and am projecting myself, which baffles my account.

Wallpaper and other patterning metiers such as Indonesian batik or Ikat weaving do this in a different way, via the shifting in a pattern between foregroundand background. To be able to do this rhythmically is possible with geometry alone.To do this with fluidity requires the arabesque.

What Dean Byington does with wizardry is move among these levels. His paintings are collages of frottages disguised as wallpaper. This involves copying copies, blurring,enlarging,re-engraving, disguising, sewing up seams. Patterning camouflages illustration,and vice-versa.The one becomes the other's ground.

Enlarging a detail as large as I could on my computer screen simply captivated me with his ingenuity:it looked like an engraving by Hercules Seghers shading off into what might be an illustration for La Fontaine's fables by Gustave Dore which filigreed into lace-like or leaf-like reticulations. What fascinated was how seamlessly they mesh.

Quite without data or empirical proof, they seem to me to be work at the threshhold where images become stories, where the idioretinal aftermages on the retina of the sleeper coalesce into a dream. In this case, one does not have to be asleep to see.