Pretentious Yet Pointless
In abstract art, the visual phenomena of the manifest world are, in themselves, meaningless: the important thing is feeling, as such. Contrasts of the freedom of the singing sperm whale and the child's foot emphasise the broad scope of the image. The arena of contrasting tone and hue in this painting, despite appearing disarmingly simple at first glance, create in the mind epistemology of space and place... The artist avoids a limited canvas to contain the colours, which in this way float free. Such forms, rapidly moving and disconcerting, create complex and fascinating interactions with the environment.
In this prototype Sol Aris depicts the relationship between colour and space. This striking piece is quintessential to one of the central preoccupations of Sol Aris's art, the creation of the arena of contrasting dark and light where the extraordinarily refined aesthetic sensibility to the piece is the sensuality of intoxification. Contrasts of sugar and wine dominate the broad scope of this image. It is important to understand that the essence of Shaker æsthetics is that it encourages the artist to define form in terms of space, rather than odour.
``The problems dealt with in abstract art relate to the interplay of forces; the geometrical forms often used by abstract artists do not indicate (as has been thought) a conscious and intellectual, mathematical approach -- a square and a circle in art are nothing in themselves and are alive only in the instinctive and ispirational use an artist can make of them in expressing a poetic idea''
[Ben Nicholsen, Notes on Abstract Art, 1942]