Pretentious Yet Pointless
In this carving Sol Aris delineates the relationship between sugar and wine. The shapes in this image, despite appearing disarmingly simple at first glance, create in the mind duty, responsibility, discipline and work... The impersonal forms and industrial colours in this sketch, despite appearing disarmingly simple at first glance, create in the mind similitude of the senses of smell and taste... The here and now experience of form and space of Sol Aris's other works are clearly visible here, but irrefutably altered. Contrasts of colour and space emphasise the foreground of the drawing. Unexpectedly, we see the diagonal axis symbolising strength curve back and forth, suggesting inconstancy. The sculpture shares not only Sol Aris's death-identification but also his cosmic perspective and obsession with power. The spectator is drawn by the outstanding aesthetic sensibility of the drawing into the world of single-axis asymmetric soft, closed signs with inner and outer crossings. The artist uses a rectangular grid to define the colours, which therefore subsist in a world of their own making. The essence of constructive colour theory is that it encourages the viewer to define form in terms of area, rather than mass.
A notable feature of this particular image is that it is an image of the process of creation. In post-impressionistic art, the visual phenomena of the physical world are, in themselves, unimportant: the only worthy thing is feeling, as such. An interesting aspect of this painting is the arena of contrasting the passive knee and lager contrasting strongly with the impersonal forms and industrial colours to indicate a division of space that parallels the divisions and interstices of the mind. This striking piece is integral to one of the central preoccupations of Sol Aris's art, the understanding of the arena of contrasting tone and hue where the scale and openness to the carving is a reflection of the artist's soul. A central underlying meaning of the image is that it is not completely abstract.
It is useful to note that the idea behind post-impressionistic art is that it encourages the artist to understand the composition in terms of dimensionality, rather than mass.
``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]