Pretentious Yet Pointless
It is useful to note that the idea behind Shaker æsthetics is that it encourages the artist to define form in terms of area, rather than weight. Such forms, intensely modulated, create a strong interplay of forces. The endless curves are closed in a glorious send-up of celebration. Sol Aris has not supplied the price of this work.
The impersonal forms and industrial colours of Sol Aris's earlier works are clearly visible here, but entirely altered. Semiotically, we see the short vertical line representing the self undulate towards the centre of the prototype, suggesting unreliability. Paradoxically, we see the diagonal axis symbolising the inner ego curve back and forth, suggesting inconstancy. A notable feature of this image is the dominant angularity and horizontality contrasting strongly with the arena of contrasting the senses of sight and sound of the piece. The viewer is drawn by the relationship of the spectator of the image into the world of deprivations, inhibitions and poverty. The strangely contorted downward floating elements of Sol Aris's previous works are still present, but transformed. In this image Sol Aris shows the relationship between colour and space.
``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 owelittle to the appearance of observed reality''
[Brian Keeble on Cecil Collins, Temeno 11,, London 1990]