Exhibit of Works by "Fractal Expressionist" Mauricio Zárate Opens at AAAS (27 January 2005)
Roger Bagula
I found this doing a Google search for fractal news.
I suppose for a fractal artist this is the "big time"?
Mauricio Zárate's web site is:
http://the-synthesis.blogspot.com/
http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2005/0127art.shtml
Exhibit of Works by "Fractal Expressionist" Mauricio Zárate Opens at AAAS
Mauricio Zárate
Evolutiva
It was the early 1990s, and Mauricio Zárate was at the University of
Southern California studying film. For a documentary class, he had the
urge to do a piece on Los Angeles itself, on its complex array of
networks and constant hum of activity. That rumination led him to chaos
theory, and chaos theory lead him on an unpredictable course that
produced a decade-long burst of bold visual creativity.
Some results of that work will be on display at AAAS headquarters in
Washington D.C. beginning Thursday, 27 January, in an exhibit called
"Evolutiva." Featuring roughly 30 photographs and paintings, the exhibit
will explore an intersection of art and science, with the works driven
by Zárate's fascination with chaos, fractals and the emergence of order
from within complex dynamical systems.
The exhibition will run through the end of April in the atrium and
gallery at AAAS, 1200 New York Ave. NW in Washington. The opening will
feature a slide lecture by Zárate, "Paths Crossed," scheduled to begin
at 5 p.m. A reception will follow from 6 to 8 p.m.
A fractal is a geometric shape or curve that repeats itself irregularly,
like a mountain range or a coastline. Zárate's paintings are often
bright and dramatic, conveying a sense of dynamic growth and evolution.
He classifies himself a "fractal expressionist," after the term coined
by physicist Richard Taylor at the University of Oregon in Eugene.
Clearly he is exploring the boundary between science, mathematics and
art, appealing to the viewer's senses, emotions and intellect at once.
"I wanted to work with the same dynamics and the same concepts as the
scientists who were working with chaos theory were working with," he
said in a recent interview. Like the abstract expressionists of the
1950s, he started with the pretext that "an accident is something that
can trigger the development of a work, but then through pictorial
techniques analogous to iteration and self-organization, the final
output goes beyond the abstract expressionist style and into the realm
of the new genre of fractal expressionism."
Along the way, Zárate says, he has been influenced by such volumes as
Benoit Mandelbrot's "The Fractal Geometry of Nature"; "The Beauty of
Fractals: Images of Complex Dynamical Systems" by Heinz-Otto Peitgen;
and "The Computational Beauty of Nature," by Gary Williams Flake.
Zárate was born in 1969 in Cali, Colombia, and left for the United
States in 1992 to study film at USC. He returned to Colombia in 1995,
where he painted and founded [Paradigma+Dinamica] a film production
company that did commercials and cutting-edge visuals in partnership
with MPC Publicidad for several clients in Colombia and South America.
But, he says, the art scene in Colombia was disenchanting and funding
was scarce; the focus on conceptual art was so strong that painters and
sculptors felt themselves relegated to an artistic underclass. Like many
of them, he left his home country, and in 2002, he landed in Miami.
Since then, he's also spent time in Los Angeles, Eugene, Ore., and
Washington D.C. Soon, Zárate says, he'll move to New York.
Through all of those changes, he's continued to paint pictures and take
photographs that explore his principal themes.
He describes his work as having several layers. There are random shapes,
and shapes which appear familiar but which appear randomly. There are
panoramas that seems abstract but that have concrete elements in them,
elements tending toward the "fractal archetype"—the appearance of
dendrites and spirals, for example.
"The next layer," he says, "is when I started to work with the idea of
emergence, or how order emerges from chaos."
Zárate says he will pursue his own continuing evolution during the AAAS
Annual Meeting in Washington next month [17-21 February 2005]. "To keep
reiterating fractals would not be an interesting progression," he says.
"I'd fall into the pattern of the artist who finds an idea and repeats
it eternally. I'm not into that."
Instead, he plans to take return to film and video, interview as many
scientists as he can at the Annual Meeting for a documentary called
"Futures Changing."
"I want to go directly to the scientists, not to ask them about theory
or their equations or their scientific experience, but more their
cosmological perception of reality, the way they relate their work to
art, and what are the positions they have toward art," Zárate says. "I
haven't see anything that that deals with how scientist and the artists
have a similar stance on reality, but work in different ways. I would
like to focus on that, and weave it with the work that I've done."
As part of that process, he wants to use systems biology software to
evaluate his own work—the 400 paintings and 4,000 photos he's produced
over the past 10 years, looking for the patterns of interaction between
concepts and images that are submerged there.
Beyond that, Zárate simply wants to see his world through the
scientists' eyes.
"I don't know if my work can have an impact on the scientists," he says.
"That's why I want to talk with them on the cosmological side, on the
perception of reality, to see if there are elements in the arts that
have influenced them or not, or if it's a myth that art and science go
together hand-in-hand. Or is it really an attractive process?… I want to
see and to know what's really going on in their minds."
— Edward W. Lempinen
27 January 2005