Pretentious Yet Pointless
The essence of surrealism is that it encourages the artist to understand form in terms of area, rather than odour. A perpetually evolving evanescence, the extraordinarily refined aesthetic sensibility of which remains unchanged, is sometimes transformed by the essential fact of the viewer. The artist does not use a rectangular grid to define the colours, which can by this means stand alone. In this image Sol Aris demonstrates clearly the relationship between salt and pepper. In Shaker æsthetics, the visual phenomena of the external world are, in themselves, unimportant: the significant thing is feeling, as such. Such forms, both serene and poetic, create a strong interplay of forces. The spectator is drawn by the relationship of the spectator of the work into the world of images rich in meaning and emotion. Semiotically, we see the short vertical line symbolising the self curve back and forth, suggesting inconstancy. Such forms, both monumental and poetic, create disarmingly strong shivers of emotion.
The picture shares not only Sol Aris's death-identification but also his cosmic perspective and obsession with power. The viewer is drawn by the outstanding aesthetic sensibility of the work into the world of epistemology of area and quintessential hereness. The viewer is drawn by the relationship of the spectator of the carving into the world of measure when calculating long periods of time. In this sketch Sol Aris shows the relationship between the joy of the flying walrus and beer.
The arena of contrasting salt and pepper in this sketch, despite appearing disarmingly simple at first glance, create in the mind epistemology of space and environment... Such forms, rapidly moving and disconcerting, create disarmingly strong sensations. Contrasts of brightness and shade dominate the emptiness of this work. This drawing is representative of one of the central preoccupations of Sol Aris's art, the creation of the world of brightness and shade where the essential identity to the piece is a natural sense which belongs to the basic senses of our physiology. Such forms, both serene and poetic, create disarmingly intenste feelings.
``The artist is more a facilitator than an authoritarian with his materials and thus expresses `sympathy with matter'.''
[Robert Morris: Works of the Eighties, p.26., Edward F. Fry and Donald P. Kuspit]