Geoffrey Dorfman: Quantapolis
Artist Statement:
Quantapolis is a coined word, such as we can find occasionally in the writings of James Joyce. It's actually a composite. In the jargon of physics, quanta are small discrete packets of energy, but I could describe paintings that way as well. A polis is a community of free individuals living together under a given set of principles or laws. Somewhat as an analog. I silo my paintings into agreeable communities: Playgrounds, Oracles, Tropiques, Rhine Maidens, and what-nots. They all know each other. Is applying the word 'polis' in this regard a bit of a stretch? Perhaps, perhaps not. I leave it to you. It doesn't matter. I savor the way Quantapolis sounds, and if some vague suggestion of grandeur is all there is to recommend it, that suffices for me.
As for my aesthetic philosophy, the Italian composer Ferruccio Busoni once wrote that an interval deeply felt and closely argued will settle on an attendant pitch (i.e. frequency) that, no matter how dissonant, no matter how it assaults the ear, is nevertheless correct. Seen that way, art is less an object than a set of relations. A century later, theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli applied this description to reality itself. Philosophers and artists can intuit what physicists later map out mathematically, but their impulses, no matter how serendipitous or even outré they might seem, rise to the level of art only if they contribute to a totalistic vision, an entirety. They must ultimately appear as necessary. Therein lies both the rigor and the difficulty of art.
As far as I'm concerned, a successful painting needs to be no more than a congress of seemingly sentient brush strokes spread this way and that on a neutral (i.e. rectangular) surface. Of course, it can be more than that, too. High-quality oil paint, the very stuff of it is just colored dirt pounded into linseed oil, but somehow its base greasiness can, in the right hands, be rendered a source of mysteriously elemental power. Artists don't actually require flights of imagination. They have only to really see what they're doing. For nearly everybody, that's extremely hard to do. Imagination, ambition, (and yes, desire) keep interfering.
