Tim White-Sobieski: video project "Moving Painting", catalog essay by David Hunt

“The movement we want to reproduce on the canvas will no longer be one single, fixed moment of universal dynamism. Quite simply, it will be dynamic sensation itself. For everything moves, runs, changes rapidly. No outline is ever quite still before our eyes: it appears and disappears constantly.”

A globe, dappled in shades of red and black, is vibrating in a tight orbit on the screen. We would focus all of our attention on its impatient oscillations, if not for the dozens of other spheres, similarly marked with muted disks and faded rings, competing for mind-share in equally anxious clusters of self-organizing forms. Biology springs to mind, cells dividing in a petri dish, mitochondria pumping energy through thin membranes, but this glimpse of a frenetic world soon gives way to a more geometric, more rationalized order. The transition is gentle, slow like a time-lapse bloom, but the full expression of its biological destiny is clearly not the goal.

A grid of dots, in perfect rows and columns, is superimposed upon a flock of concentric circles. They, too, conceal blob-like clusters of painterly red pigment caught up in their rounded crosshairs. In this case, first thought is not best thought, for instinct might lead us to Lichtenstein’s benday patterns and Polke’s collage techniques; commercial strategies that once, long ago, reminded us of the equality of high and low, serial repetition, techniques of the magazine, the newspaper, the comic book, and the printed label. The scene changes again in its drifting, breezy way, tissues seeming to rise up out of dispersed hemoglobin, announcing their pleats and folds—the spongy topology of the body’s viscera—then collapsing like a folding chair, planes converging as if sucked through a wormhole only to reemerge as a shimmering moiré pattern, deceptive in its optical peaks and valleys. After a moment of resolution, of brief crystalline clarity, the whole morphs, then soon stabilizes to rest like a lattice upon a blinking checkerboard of green, red, black, white, and grey, pulsing in and out like dopplering cautionary traffic signs fused with the right angles of the street.

The music provides the pace of change—of reconfiguration, permutation, and recombination—a techno-hymn between ambient and accident, with long notes


Tim White: Moving Paintings
David Hunt
	“The movement we want to reproduce on the canvas will no longer be one single, fixed moment of universal dynamism. Quite simply, it will be dynamic sensation itself. For everything moves, runs, changes rapidly. No outline is ever quite still before our eyes: it appears and disappears constantly.” F. T. Marinetti, The Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting , 1910. A globe, dappled in shades of red and black, is vibrating in a tight orbit on the screen. We would focus all of our attention on its impatient oscillations, if not for the dozens of other spheres, similarly marked with muted disks and faded rings, competing for mind-share in equally anxious clusters of self-organizing forms. Biology springs to mind, cells dividing in a petri dish, mitochondria pumping energy through thin membranes, but this glimpse of a frenetic world soon gives way to a more geometric, more rationalized order. The transition is gentle, slow like a time-lapse bloom, but the full expression of its biological destiny is clearly not the goal. A grid of dots, in perfect rows and columns, is superimposed upon a flock of concentric circles. They, too, conceal blob-like clusters of painterly red pigment caught up in their rounded crosshairs. In this case, first thought is not best thought, for instinct might lead us to Lichtenstein’s benday patterns and Polke’s collage techniques; commercial strategies that once, long ago, reminded us of the equality of high and low, serial repetition, techniques of the magazine, the newspaper, the comic book, and the printed label. The scene changes again in its drifting, breezy way, tissues seeming to rise up out of dispersed hemoglobin, announcing their pleats and folds—the spongy topology of the body’s viscera—then collapsing like a folding chair, planes converging as if sucked through a wormhole only to reemerge as a shimmering moiré pattern, deceptive in its optical peaks and valleys. After a moment of resolution, of brief crystalline clarity, the whole morphs, then soon stabilizes to rest like a lattice upon a blinking checkerboard of green, red, black, white, and grey, pulsing in and out like dopplering cautionary traffic signs fused with the right angles of the street. The music provides the pace of change—of reconfiguration, permutation, and recombination—a techno-hymn between ambient and accident, with long notes

		Roy Lichtenstein Still Life with Glass and Peeled Lemon 1972 Oil and Magna on canvas 42 x 48 in Joseph Helman, New York



		Sigmar Polke Stairwell (Treppenhaus), 1982 Synthetic emulsion on printed fabric 91 5/8 x 158 1/2 in. Hirshhorn Museum , Washington DC