Maria Cox

Verónica Flores

John Mendelsohn

Human beings have been interested in the perception of objects in space at least since antiquity. It was popularly thought in ancient Greece that objects could be seen because they emitted what was imagined to be a continuous series of extremely thin “membranes” in their own image; these fell upon the eye and merged into the picture that was perceived.  Now it is known that we see the world in so-called Cyclopean space - the images from each single eye fuse to produce a single visual field.  Cyclopean space does not completely explain how the eye and mind resolve space and the depth of space.  Contemporary theories still wrestle with the possible levels of inborn capability and empirical learning as infants through touch and sound.

The history of art includes long periods of striving to obtain the realistic representation of space in a two-dimensional painting.  The Renaissance painters rediscovered and perfected the ancient tools of perspective drawing to make images that, to the eye, evoked “real” space.  Tromp l’oeil effects in paintings of that period are the best examples of trying to fool the viewer into the perception of space that is really not there.  Space, of course, continues to be an intrinsic element of paintings and artists continue to challenge us with what they are presenting and how we perceive it.  The fact that our physiological process of perceiving space is not easily defined may be why those artworks that play with our space perception are often of interest, perhaps by animating our unconscious processing of atypical, unresolved space.

The artists selected for SPACE PERCEPTION create works that are not what they appear to be at first glance from a distance and other effects are revealed as the viewer moves closer.  As the mind attempts to resolve the image, the complexity of the process of seeing and observing the work makes the work that more compelling.  Veronica Flores presents large blown-up prints of small ink drawings made in her sketchbook of the tops of Manhattan buildings seen from the street that push and pull between the positive black of the building tops and the negative white space in between.   The paintings of Peggy Bates reveal themselves to be paintings in relief where the physicality of the paint itself expands the image into the viewer’s space.  John Mendelsohn presents elegant and sophisticated versions of optical effects that make his bands of paint vibrate and move.