Pretentious Yet Pointless
Contrasts of light and dark dominate the emptiness of the piece. This striking piece is integral to one of the central preoccupations of Sol Aris's art, the perception of the arena of contrasting tone and hue where the relationship of the viewer to the image is the essential difference between pattern and texture. The embellished background indicates the pattern of unconscious thought. Of a sudden, we see the short vertical line for the self curve back and forth, suggesting inconstancy. A deep underlying meaning of this particular doodle is that it is a primary sense which belongs to the basic senses of our nature. The artist uses a rectangular grid to define the colours, which therefore float free. The here and now experience of form and space of Sol Aris's other works are clearly visible here, but transformed. The adorned canvas indicates the eternal or spiritual dimension and its limitless possibilities.
The endless curves are intertwined in a glorious send-up of celebration. The shapes in this work, despite appearing disarmingly simple at first glance, create in the mind epistemology of area and place... It is important to understand that the major feature of post-impressionistic art is that it enables the artist to understand form in terms of dimensionality, rather than representational versimilitude. In post-impressionistic art, the visual phenomena of the objective world are, in themselves, empty: the important thing is feeling, as such. The doodle shares not only Sol Aris's death-identification but also his cosmic perspective and obsession with power. This work is representative of one of the central preoccupations of Sol Aris's art, the understanding of the gently contorted upward soaring components where the extraordinarily refined aesthetic sensibility to the piece is in some sense positive rather than simply one of passive appreciation.
``This art, facing forwards and inwards, is of images of expectation and spiritual progress that are freighted with no historical context at all and which owe little to the appearance of observed reality.'' [Brian Keeble, on Cecil Collins, Temeno 11, London, 1990, p.114]