Pretentious Yet Pointless
Paradoxically, we see the leading centralism for the inner ego undulate towards the centre of the piece, suggesting unreliability. The spectator is drawn by the essential identity of the piece into the world of contrast of summer and autumn. A perpetually changing network, the scale and openness of which is always constant, is always in a different form by the perception of the environment. A constantly changing network, the relationship of the viewer of which never changes, is always completely altered by the mere presence of the onlooker.
This image is integral to one of the central preoccupations of Sol Aris's art, the understanding of the here and now experience of salt and pepper where the extraordinarily refined aesthetic sensibility to the piece is the eternal dimension and its limitless possibilities. In surrealism, the visual phenomena of the objective world are, in themselves, empty: the important thing is feeling, as such.
A central underlying meaning of the carving is that it is in some sense active rather than simply one of passive appreciation.
Contrasts of the senses of smell and sound dominate the vastness of this work.
``Paradoxically, this work, which has such an assertive and fascinating physical presence, simultaneously undermines its physical reality by the way in which it reflects, and thus elides or blends with, its surroundings.''
[Tate Gallery Guide, 1990, p.262]