For about a decade, artist and educator Alan Singer has been experimenting
with mathematical visualization programs to make fine art. He writes computer
code that recreates the natural phenomena of form and color, creating
geometry-based abstractions that become dazzling monotype prints, which in turn
inform the geometric visuals he paints in oil and acrylic. Singer’s recent
paintings and prints are featured in “Shapely,” a solo exhibit currently on
view at AXOM Gallery.
Singer was
born into an artistic family. His father was the late wildlife artist Arthur
Singer, who exposed his son to a world of artists and gallery exhibitions
at a young age. And though Alan Singer’s early work followed a more traditional
path, he says he’s always felt an impulse to push into uncharted territories.
A professor
of art at Rochester Institute of Technology for 30 years, Singer points to his
students’ use of digital tools as one catalyst of his current mode of making
art. He says he became interested in the mathematic processes behind the images
created by users of such programs as Photoshop or Illustrator. And Singer was
working with geometric shapes in his paintings, and says he wanted to make those
shapes more perfect.
He began
using mathematical visualization software such as Cinderella, 3D XplorMath, and
KnotPlot to learn some code commands, and experimented with creating imagery
from that code. He can create simple, colorful shapes, or give the shapes’
surfaces reflective or textural qualities. The possibilities are infinite, and
he’s teaching himself new tricks all of the time.
Though
they’re two-dimensional, many of Singer’s monotype prints contain such a sense
of depth, it seems like you could walk into the plane and explore that world in
three dimensions. Singer makes images heavy with shapes and bright, bold spectrums
of curved light, creating highly abstracted playgrounds onto which a viewer can project their own associations.
The dreamy, appropriately-titled 2016 work “Enigma” features a dark
almost-sphere, balanced by a glowing yellow dome and surrounded by flowing
lines of bright and dusky curves. The scene brings to my mind a cliff and
waterway at sunset, with some inscrutable dark body floating on the water. It
seems like a liminal, intangible space, ruled by some unfathomable presence.
Many other
pieces similarly straddle metaphysical and tangible realms. The subdued
glory-shape in the 2018 monotype “Tacit Knowledge” is pushed and pulled by
bursts of primary colors, and reads like a private epiphany made visible. The
Art Deco-esque “Importance of Light” is dominated by an absinthe-green sphere
floating over the junction of a dark rift, and has an undeniable feeling of
reverence to it. “Tropicalia” has no solid forms in it, but its shapes and hot
hues speak of sunlight and fronds of equatorial flora.
In other
works, the shapes take on more concrete personalities and are staged in
slightly more defined, dimensional environments. For example, in the monotype
print “Pose Please” figurative elements shaped like knotted tubes interact, the
cheeky title insinuating that one is photographing the other.
There’s a
sneaky balance between what can be read as narratives or reductive, pure
phenomena in the various pieces, and many of the works feel almost cosmic in
nature. The ribbons of light pouring forth from a central vanishing point in
Singer’s 2017 work “Spinner” bring to mind a scene in the film, “2001: A Space
Odyssey,” in which the protagonist Dave is traveling through the wormhole.
But Singer hasn’t
forsaken analog methods of creating art — he says he still revels in the
tangible materials and the emotional connection of the human hand in art. He
often creates oil, acrylic, or pastel paintings based on his code-based
renderings. Curves of light and primary colors dance on the oblong panels in
“Five Spot,” an installation of oil paintings that bring to mind the colorful
tricks of reflected light on the surfaces of floating soap bubbles. Another
oil-on-oval-panel, “Inside Outside” is a painstakingly-painted series of
bright, curved lines, dizzyingly arching into a vanishing point.
One of the
largest works in the show, the two-panel, acrylic painting “Night Crown” seems
to be titled for the subtle dark blue ring painted over the buzzing, shifting
geometric pattern that straddles the panels. Built of four converging hexagonal
panels, the oil painting “New Neighborhood” shifts between waves hot
wavelengths of light, and pixelated fractals spiraling infinitely inward.
Just like a
photographer in the darkroom working to document which methods create what
outcomes, Singer takes extensive notes to document the results of his
experimental use of code. He’s got many books full of these notes, and says he
might publish them in the future.
This article appears in Feb 20-26, 2019.
