Pretentious Yet Pointless
An interesting aspect of the sketch is that it is the essential distinction between pattern and texture. The arena of contrasting salt and bare hands of Sol Aris's other works are clearly visible here, but transformed. The artist does not use traditional proportions to restrict the colours, which in this way float free. Unexpectedly, we see the diagonal axis symbolising strength curve back and forth, suggesting unreliability. This image is integral to one of the central preoccupations of Sol Aris's art, the understanding of the shapes where the essential identity to the image is the pattern of unconscious thought. The writhing curves are closed in a glorious send-up of celebration. The decorated canvas belies a division of space that parallels the divisions and interstices of the mind.
``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]