The title Entropvisions is in homage to my mother, the poet and art critic, Harriet Zinnes. In 1990 New Directions published a collection of her poems titled Entropisms, a word she made-up combining entropy - the tendency toward disorder - and tropism - the growth towards or away from a stimulus. Similarly, my short reviews combine entropy and tropism by suggesting growth towards a vision of art from the chaos of the art world. Through the back door, my title also pays homage to my physicist father, Irving Zinnes, whose long discussions with my mom got her thinking about entropy and tropism in the first place.
David Hornung, who wrote an important textbook on color theory and practice, is himself a terrific colorist, as his painting exhibition at JJ Murphy, up through March 9, makes clear. He is also an improvisational painter, equating his process to that of the great jazz musicians, whose deep understanding of “structure, harmony, rhythm, melody and pacing,” gave them the freedom to let go, to allow the unconscious to lead, to find where a loud note, fast beat, focused area or supporting quiet space needed to be. Hornung spent years painting representationally, gaining an understanding of his own internal rhythms and form, and now has let go of the structure of reality to allow free-association of shape as it combines with color, of innuendo as it combines with appearance. Hornung claims he is painting purely abstractly, and has no explicitly narrative intention, but the longer his paintings are viewed, the more some sense of allusive content emerges. With titles like “Message in a Bottle,” or “Swimmer,” or “Rhythm,” we seem to be asked to search for what the “message” of the rectangular forms, suggestive of paper notes, placed next to what could be a bottle, might contain, or where that swimmer is swimming to, or how the dialogue between the two differently-composed halves of “Riddle” might clue us into the title’s answer. At times, even specific objects materialize from within the abstractions, for instance, a floating ferris wheel, musical notations, exclamation marks, boxes and windows. Though the titles might be created after the painting was made, and therefore may not directly reflect the conscious intentions of the painter, these elegantly composed paintings, made with subtle, nuanced color, also indirectly suggest hidden, sometimes even whimsical, mysteries of possibilities, states of mind, and imaginative scenarios of an open and poetic visual artist