SEPTEMBER 11 - OCTOBER 6, 2021
missing the forest for the trees
floyd absalon
To look at a forest is to have a sweeping view of its expanse including the horizon and its porous border of mountains and sky. This is just one way of viewing it, from above, as an omniscient hawk-like view that scans mere tops of dense foliage. A forest can also be viewed from its flooring of a network of mycelium and mulch, as lacy canopies of arterial branches of leaves dotting the sky. An upright person walking through it and being within and enveloped by it, a forest is an infinite overlap of tree trunks of varying widths and brownness and greenness, a tangle of vines and bushes here and there. A forest from a distance is a dark cavern of enigma framed by trees at the edge of a field of overgrowth and ruins. But we mostly know of forests and see them as mediated images in media, few among us urbanites have actually done a Thoreau and lived in them deliberately. Trees are but what we can grasp at in our built environment, a few here and there, counted among ten fingers the spindly trunks we encounter in neighborhood yards and planned aspirational oases in malls and public parks. Is this scarcity what we base upon our metaphors of our perception and cognition of the world?
Floyd Absalon conscripts this idiom of comparative scale of perception to what we value and give weight to, chromatically metering the universalities with particularities, what do we really truly see and give credence to our perceived understanding of something, or everything or actually nothing.
We glean from the very detailed kaleidoscopic patterns of his paintings attempts at concealment, at the same time a layered peeling of further images, animal forms furtively peeking out or was it just an illusion? Or do we see them because it was suggested so or there’s none such at all? Only a persistence of a form that we seek in the patterns? For how can it just be patterns, surely there must be more to it than geometric shapes of analogous colours. In the alternating regularity of contrasts and tones, some slight disruption conjures yet another form, yet remaining ambiguous, fooling around with our sense of figure and ground. It’s a magic eye camouflage. However for the artist, he terms this instead as osmotic camouflage, where figure and ground waver and is in a stasis of transition, they permeate each realm and so gets de/configured in their diffusion.
We recognize a mass of trees as forests, automatically coded in our brain that a succession of them is indeed one. We retain information as patterns, we comprehend things as patterns, e.g. a then b then c, tree then forest then land then domain. Pattern then becomes a retention of logic not just a mere repetition of form. Hence, we have stroke then shape then color then form then painting then series then body of work then an exhibition then artist’s curriculum vitae. But to be specific for the show we can then have stroke then shape then color then form then another form then another form then painting then series. We look first at the trees before the forest.
The paintings are arranged as a spectrum, from blue-purple tones to yellow-green tones to red. On another wall and deliberately isolated are panels painted monochromatically in greys. It’s a logic of form and yet an illustration of the artist’s premise/point of how the very act of looking is engaged with. We might gaze at them as a whole chromatic series, panning from left to right to left before targeting on an individual panel, a minute detail, taking a sweep once again of the whole then honing in towards another part, another fragment of a detail, trying to discern If there really is another form hidden underneath. But this writing has called attention to such a second time and one may just horse blind everything else to this hunt. As Alexandra Horowitz puts in in her book On Looking : “ Attention is an intentional, unapologetic discriminator. It asks what is relevant right now, and gears us up to notice only that.” Hence, “the thing you are doing now affects the thing you see next”, expectation is to attention is to perceptual restriction is to partial observation is to bias cognition is to condition retention. Just as six blind men defining an elephant by its mere parts, observation involves the whole ecology rather than a single leaf, and yet still a leaf is to tree is to forest is to land is to domain is to world.
- Lena Cobangbang
works in the exhibit