HOWARD NEUFELD, artist

REALISM, ABSTRACTION, and REALITY:

Artist's Statement:

The Golden Section as magically omnipotent,

A non-objective illusion as magically real.

The Golden Section as Reality, becomes an aesthetic realism,

A non-objective illusion as realism, becomes an aesthetic Reality.

At first glance, people see my paintings as abstract, however, if that's a correct reading, I'm committing the unforgivable sin of favoring illusionism and a few other two-dimensional pictorial phenomena, often the means for achieving realism over some of the established characteristics of abstraction, namely flatness, painterly surface, or what's referred to as literalism in post-modern abstraction. Instead, I try to create a place within my paintings where reason and magic can become Reality, beyond the norm.

To do this I use the combination of what I call Structure and Chaos, representing the binary complements of Nature as "external" Reality and psychologically, the rational and irrational as "internal" Reality. For what I call Structure, not Order as such, I use a fractal geometry (Phi). Recently I discovered a "disclosure" of non-Euclidean geometry that had taken place in a painting I was working on. This was a result of my intuitively adding quarter-circle arc-lines only meant to break up all the straight lines in the Phi configurations. In my research I found that non-Euclidean geometry is directly associated with Einstein's space-time continuum. For Chaos, I use a Process that requires intuition and simultaneous-receptivity instead of conscious intent on my part, to produce non-objective illusions, if you will, non-descriptive visual phenomena.