Mandalas and Modules
Introduction
Mandalas and Modules pairs ten paintings of mine from various series with ten of Ron Hartgrove’s works from his Grid Series and his Mandala: The Yes in No series. These pairings are arranged in a systematic sequence as if each piece is a still frame in a film, or in other words, a module within a narrative structure. The interpretation of each painting is consequently informed by its position amid the rest of the works in the collection. Therefore, the meaning of the exhibition emerges through pictorial relationships, via a kind of synthetic grid, rather than only as a self-evident and self-contained sphere of experience. These visual connections tell an abstract story in which Hartgrove’s mandala is deconstructed and reconstituted, seemingly due to the influence of chaotic forces, particularly but not exclusively represented by my paintings which were made using a random number generator. However, later in the tale it is uncertain whether the surrounding disorder becomes organized into spiral geometries by the action of the orb itself, or whether the spirals are restoring the orb to its original state, thus complicating our linear categories of cause and effect. Furthermore, a cyclical pattern to the plot is implied, reflecting the circular shape of the mandala. Surprisingly, the modular succession of events described, or rather, performed in the images becomes a mandalic temporal wheel, which is in turn supported by the conceptual framework that is the basis for the exhibition itself, namely, the cooperation between my and Ron’s own philosophical and spiritual tendencies. But let us not rule out the obscure inspiration or muse that drives these tendencies. To summarize, on several levels, mandala is module and module is mandala. So the recurring journey of the archetype of the mandala through a modular wilderness may suggest either that order is an outgrowth of entropy instead of its mere antithesis, which echoes contemporary scientific theories, or that entropy is an expression of a deep underlying order, as perennial theologies and metaphysics have intuited. The viewer is invited to consider both sides of the argument as different aspects of the same problem, which is nothing less than the question that has plagued and puzzled humanity for millennia in myriad manifestations: What is the meaning of life and death? What is consciousness and the unconscious? What is reality, and what is illusion?
