May 15th, 2009
“What finally emerges? Or rather, what finally emerges when we resist the typical interpretive ploy of exclusion, of referring to a picture as revealing something (its presumed subject) and suppressing most everything else, of promoting a position and refusing others? Consider Parallel Rendering 1, 1996. There curving strokes sometimes end abruptly as they intersect with other bars of color, yet they continue visually as an embossed ghost of a former presence. In another painter’s work such an effect might detract from the primary pictorial theme, but for Winters it serves to remove a sense of dominance or singleness of purpose and to raise the level of sensory tension. The “pattern” in Parallel Rendering 1 is decidedly hard to define, not an unusual condition of Winters’s art. His designs are incompossibles. They move simultaneously in several directions, having multiple senses that make no (one) sense. Parallel Rendering 1 forms a grid, a mesh, a weave, a set of angles, a set of curves, a spiral, an ellipse and a rectangle, all in a glance. It is thick and thin, dense and airy. When one visual or tactile direction in the work becomes dominant, another intervenes, whether as opposition or merely as modification. Some of the shifts affect our spatial sense; some affect our temporal sense. Each of the many elements of pattern that constitute the one unruly diagram of Winters’s painting is a sensory force that impacts on all others. By actively interfering and leaving traces of conflict (the ridges and bumps of a Winters oil painting), each element becomes as much like the others as it can be. The very fact of the material interference and physical contiguity causes all conceivable resemblance to become evident. Rectangles begin to circle, and the curving line goes straight. Yet this happens with every element retaining its material specificity. Interference — over which Winters might claim an unintended mastery — is that tenuous moment at which sameness and difference are equally evident as relational values, as mutual inflection.”
Richard Shiff, from Manual Imagination, from the catalog Terry Winters, Paintings, Drawings, Prints 1994-2004
…
The simultaneity of differing states.