The Fractalist Artist
by Susan Condé
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The twenty-first century may come to be known as the Age of Complexity. It is an era that is attempting to grapple with irregularity, metamorphic forms and changing notions about order and disorder. Whether they be scientists, sociologists or artists, people are addressing the existence of the irregular, the fluid, the irrational and the "inbetween,"---ideas that are viewed as the building blocks of a new paradigm for creativity in art. The artists presented in this gallery are part of an international group working with fractal art. Fractal art is an artistic practice based in concepts from fractal geometry, chaos theory and complexity theory. Each artist shown here pursues his or her individual artistic expression and style and yet remains linked to the others by an interest in exploring complex forms, themes of self-similarity, scaling, order and disorder, and the relationship of the microcosmos to the macrocosmos. Fractal artists project a fractal imagination of the world through their work. It is a world in which space has become fractal---i.e. imploded, dense, hyperactive, interconnected. The fractal artist declares that space can no longer be considered minimal, expressionistic or conceptual. Instead, contemporary fractal artists seek to reflect the condition of space in their time as they perceive it, with its fractal dimensions and qualities. For the fractal artist, the physical and psychological landscape of today has nothing to do with the Cartesian-Corbusien concept of space that has dominated contemporary architecture. The fractal artist sees the utopianism of the Euclidean form as a vestige of Cartesian philosophies formulated around the concepts of measurability and predictability. The fractal artist believes that the Cartesian model excludes the irregularity and dynamics of reality, as observed in the physical cosmos as well as in human nature. The fractal artist projects the artist's vision of the complex contemporary city's architecture of overlain conduits and labyrinthian networks, of nature's forms now reflected in the sprawling citiscape that threatens to obliterate natural space. Paradoxically, the fractal spaces of nature are being replaced by the fractal spaces of our hermetic, dynamic societies. Susan Condé Art critic and writer 33 East 70 St New York, New York 10021 USA tel: (212)249-4976 E-mail: SusanConde@aol.com see the work in the The Fractalist Artist exhibit
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