Jump and Flow - Gilbert Hsiao

http://brenthallard.wordpress.com/2012/05/05/jump-and-flow-gilbert-hsiao/

Gilbert:  I was aware of op as a historical movement of course; I was an art history major at Columbia before deciding to move into fine art. And op is one of the most distinguishable styles out there. Even if it wasn’t around to be seen first hand (which it certainly wasn’t in the 1960s in the town of Terre Haute, Indiana where I grew up) its influence was everywhere; you didn’t have to go to a gallery or museum to experience it.


Talking about what effect Hsiao tries to create in his style of work.....

Brent: The World Clock and Inverted Memory are early pieces made in the nineties, with another, an even earlier painting, Composition with Four Black Squares and Four White Squares, made around the mid-eighties: these aren’t optical paintings in the sense there’s no overload and there are no illusionist shifts. The viewer is able to hold the visual information, while the flow remains relatively stable. How did you move from these early pieces to, say, a work like Revolver, which is dated 2007?

Composition with Four Black Squares and Four White Squares (1986), acrylic on canvas, 60″x 60″

                                                   Revolver (2006), acrylic on wood, 42″ x 42″

Gilbert:  Well it really depends on one’s definition of optical. A dictionary definition would say optical refers to either light or sight, which would at some level refer to all the visual arts. I think you’re using it in an art historical context here, referring to op art, what Time magazine referred to it as ‘Art That Attacks the Eye‘ when op was taking the country by storm. I think this is what you mean when you talk about the eye having the ability to hold information or not.

[Art: OP ART: PICTURES THAT ATTACK THE EYE

MAN'S eyes are not windows, although he has long regarded them as such. They can be baffled, boggled and balked. They often see things that are not there and fail to see things that are. In the eyes resides man's first sense, and it is fallible.

Preying and playing on the fallibility in vision is the new movement of "optical art" that has sprung up across the Western world. No less a break from abstract expressionism than pop art, op art is made tantalizing, eye-teasing, even eye-smarting by visual researchers using all the ingredients...]

Brent:  Okay, I was thinking in terms of op art.

Gilbert:  I have never thought in terms of the quantity of information that the eye can hold or that the mind can process. Nor do I want to attack anyone’s eye. I think more in terms of ways visual information can be organized with the goal of achieving a perceived experience that is pure and total but at the same time not static. From my earliest forays into abstraction in the early 80s, I was thinking in terms of making a static canvas appear to move, whether in terms of it moving across the surface (on an x and y-axis) or from front to back (on a z-axis). If I create this movement it would result in a viewing experience that would require the observer’s involvement over a period of time, much as the experience of listening to music requires time.

• This desire to capture time has been consistent in my work; in that respect I don’t see a difference between my earlier work and my current work. What seem to be evolving are the shapes I am using as visual (or one could say musical) elements. 
•  There’s a lot of figure/ground shifting that supplies them with much of their dynamism.  After 2000 or so I’ve worked almost exclusively with stripes. Revolver is an example of this.
• The stripes allowed for the development of the shaped supports that evolved slowly over time, and which continue to do so.  I can’t imagine making a painting using square elements in a shaped support.

Brent:  I’m glad you mention ‘duration’. In painting, ‘time’ is a funny thing, just as the Z-axis is. Probably what I was suggesting is that the work approaching the nineties became faster, started to operate with retinal overload, along with the blurring of information. This, call it a hybrid system if you will, creates another entry into the experience.

Gilbert:  I would agree that there is accelerated blurring of information on an overall level that continues to this day. At the same time this accelerated blurring is highly controlled, although the results are not predetermined, as I never know how the end result will look until the tape is pulled off. It’s interesting that you allude to speed. I was not thinking about speed in the nineties; however it has been something I have become conscious of in the last three or four years.

Hybrid system – I’m not sure I’m clear what you mean by that but it sounds interesting.  Could you elaborate?

Brent:  Jump and flow… I guess what I mean is what’s actually there and what we experience differs, or undergoes change, through the gears of perception. 

So looking at the ‘jump and flow’ of Go Off: the piece is shaped. It performs around that shape. The work doesn’t confuse with some other experience, though it could, I guess, given people’s imagination. The painting is itself, and this is the way it goes.

                                                           Go Off ( 2007), acrylic on wood

•  During the 80s and 90s I was interested in movement described as ‘recalcitrant motion’ and ‘syncopation’. The paintings were an arena where the eye bounced around, sometimes repetitively, sometimes not. There was something cyclical about them.  I didn’t consciously leave that, and it’s still in my work, but a different kind of speed or acceleration has developed. More recent work demands more space around the physical painting; the eyes at times fly off the work and onto the surrounding walls.
• Gilbert:  As far as visualization goes, I think I have an idea of what a piece will look like, which is why I begin it in the first place. The visualization has a lot to do with my memory and past experience of my work up to that particular point in time. As the piece develops, this visualization in my mind fades as the piece comes into being. 

COLOUR:

Color usually does not become a concern of mine until the first phase of the work is done, that is the black and the silver are done.  I visualize what color might achieve with the piece at hand and then proceed from there. The use of color totally changes the effect – the jump and flow, the grouping, the total perception of the work. So it’s a big decision whether to continue on with color, or to keep the piece without color.   The black, white and silver pieces have all been visualized with color, even if in the end I decided not to go down the color route.

Brent:  So – what you are saying is that you can do without the physical presence of color to give a sense of it?

Gilbert:  I’m saying that without the physical sense of color, a profoundly different sense of space is perceived. Black and white works oscillate between surface and infinity, while the use of color defines something in between.

To go back to your sound of the note analogy, it’s kind of like the difference between the sound of a note and the sound of a chord. A note is about a sound in space, followed by reverberations related to the note; it’s fleeting.

Color is more analogous to the chord: it complicates things with relationships of harmony or dissonance, and with overtones from each note that interact with one another; it has more punch and presence, almost a material being. Color creates tension. It creates relationships that arrest the mind or eye or whatever while those relationships are processed.

This is all determined by how we see; of course the cones in our eyes perceive color, while rods perceive movement and contrasts of light and dark. Take away the color element and the entire focus is on light, dark and movement.  So it follows that the black and white work is ‘speedier.’ Add color, and things slow down as the cones, which form the focal point of our vision, fire. The rods are located on the periphery, but there are many more rods than cones.

read more about perception of the viewer.....