Remerger Digital Redux

Re-emerge and Remerge: My zigzag artistic journey 

For Remerger Digital Redux, the online virtual version of my solo pop-up show, Remerger 20260410-11, which was exhibited on April 10 & 11 at Garage Montrose, Houston, Texas

‘Remerger’ is a word that I had once considered for a painting series but never used. Many of my painting series are titled with words that begin with ‘re’ and end in ‘er’, giving the impression of palindromes, which I have liked since art school. This particular term puns on the concept of re-emergence, as in an art world context, when an artist who has left, later returns. This is somewhat my experience since I did not exhibit my work in public very much for many years after grad school, although I kept making art privately. This was partly due to personal challenges and to my need to focus on my GIS career, which I fell into after art school, but also because I was rarely satisfied with the form and substance of my art during that long hiatus. I was still trying to find my voice, as it were, or rather, my muse.

Of course, the title of this show, Remerger, also has meaning in a scientific framework, such as referring to the emergence of order out of chaos, which relates to my use of an online random number generator to design my paintings. But more about that later. Right now, let me say that for me the title suggests reintegration with a greater whole. I feel integration is an underlying theme in my art, expressed in a formal way through the unity of figure and ground in my compositions. Optical bands of color weave over and under each other across the surface of my paintings like threads in a fabric, or drips and brushstrokes in an Ab-Ex painting. On a personal level, Remerger also alludes to my reintegration with the Houston art community, which I have been working towards for the last few years. In that time, it has been a sincere joy to reconnect with old friends and colleagues, with past classmates and professors. I am grateful to everyone who has welcomed me back into their homes, studios, and galleries. Also, I appreciate all of the new friends I have made, from artists, gallerists, curators, and collectors, to general lovers of art. Your feedback and support have been invaluable. I don’t want to forget, however, those who walked with me during my time away, encouraging my personal and artistic growth, and supporting my eventual re-entry into the world of art. To my family, mentors, and crit group—you know who you are: Thank you so, so, so much.

Please let me offer some brief notes about the work in the show. The paintings that hung on the beautifully raw plywood walls of Garage Montrose on April 10th and 11th are overall very recent, from the last two years. But there are also some small examples of my first experiments with hard-edge geometric abstraction from 2022 onwards. These earlier works on paper are provided for context, to show the development of my thinking about composition and especially about color. My muse, which I mentioned before, doesn’t take me down straight paths. Often it’s in a zigzag line, and sometimes it’s even in the proverbial one step forward, two steps back kind of progression. This element of contingency and uncertainty has found its way into the work itself. As I also hinted above, all of my painting since late 2024 has involved using an online random number generator that draws on atmospheric noise to make particular decisions about color and composition. Specifically, if a number is odd or even, it will determine whether a line may go up or down, or whether a color will be darker or lighter than its neighbor. The actual palettes of the paintings are my own concoction, however, as are many other aspects of the designs. I like to think that I provide the parameters within which chance can play, so that meaning can not only emerge out of noise, but also remerge with it, in a kind of cyclic dance.

I should also quickly mention that there’s a small sculpture in the show, because why not? I don’t want to say much about it because this concept is still in the R&D phase. But its relation to my two-dimensional work should be relatively easy to interpret. In fact, it has informed my paintings over the last year as much as it was influenced by my fascination with geometric abstraction. It has been a sort of philosopher’s stone to me, an object of contemplation as well as a source of inspiration. It can perhaps be thought of as a three-dimensional instantiation of my muse, which is always shifting, spiraling, and therefore, unpredictable.

Luc Sokolowski 

April 13, 2026