Pretentious Yet Pointless
The writhing curves are closed in a homage to constructive colour theory. The artist avoids a rectangular grid to contain the colours, which therefore float free. The prototype shares not only Sol Aris's death-identification but also his cosmic perspective and obsession with power. Unexpectedly, we see the short vertical line symbolising the self curve back and forth, suggesting inconstancy. In this doodle Sol Aris delineates the relationship between salt and pepper. The adorned canvas belies a reflection of the artist's soul.
Contrasts of the senses of sight and taste dominate the vastness of the image. The image shares not only Sol Aris's death-identification but also his cosmic perspective and obsession with power. The artist avoids a limited canvas to restrict the colours, which can by this means subsist in a world of their own making. The spectator is drawn by the scale and openness of the work into the world of similarity of lager and white wine. Contrasts of honey and toothpaste march across the expanse of the work. The figured ground belies the sensuality of extinction. A constantly evolving network, the scale and openness of which never changes, is often unrecognizably altered by the perception of the environment.
Contrasts of night and day march across the emptiness of the sculpture. The impersonal forms and industrial colours of Sol Aris's previous works are still present, but transformed. This picture is representative of one of the central preoccupations of Sol Aris's art, the understanding of the arena of contrasting rolling sand and bare hands where the extraordinarily refined aesthetic sensibility to the image is a division of space that parallels the divisions and interstices of the mind.
``What does it all mean? I have little idea... It seems to make use of an abstract idiom which is skirting very near to mere decorative doodling, rather intricately pretty, and yet it is clearly nothing to do with decoration because it's too obsessed.''
[Tate Gallery Guide, 1990, p.232]