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RICHARD PURDY
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The Encaustic Paintings of Richard Purdy Since his last show, five years ago, Richard Purdy has been working on a body of wax encaustic paintings based on Stephen Wolfram's book, A New Kind of Science. Purdy utilizes a simple mathematical formula to create his compositions based in Wolfram's cellular automata. Rather than fill the squares in his grid with numbers (a la Wolfram) Purdy fills his with a dazzling array of color. Linking this exhibition to the artist's last is his use of "signature materials," wax encaustic, pigment, wood panels. In most of the paintings, the artist selects white as his background color, the white functioning as both color and light. In some of the paintings the artist chooses black as the background, which makes the rainbow palette of tiny wax squares shimmer like tesserai of a stained glass window. While based in science, these paintings are visually arresting; they require no knowledge of the theory the artist uses to create the compositions. |
Richard Purdy, "69-150, 2004, encaustic on plywood, 36 x 48 inches |
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Richard Purdy, "156", 2004, encaustic on plywood, x inches |
All of Purdy's works are titled simply with a number, which indicates how the artist programmed the "pattern" of the painting. In 146, a diptych, four vertical white columns traverse the composition, creating a rhyth-mic, musical motif. At the left is a small male figure, at the right a small female figure. Is the artist suggesting a possible walk through his colorful maze-like structure, or as tiny figures, are man and woman dwarfed in the face of science?
Mark Daniel Cohen has written about Purdy's new work: "The encaustic paintings of Richard Purdy employ a technique drawn from contemporary scientific thought. Inspired by a concept from the physicist Stephen Wolfram, their compositions are generated by a mathematical mechanism called cellular automata. In essence, cellular automata work on a grid. The boxes in the first row are filled arbitrarily with numbers. And then each box in the rest of the rows is given a numerical value automatically, based on a simple mathematical formula that refers to the values of the boxes it sits next to. |
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"Purdy generates his compositions on a computer, using a simple mathematical formula of his own devising, which fills the boxes with colors rather than numbers. Painting by hand in encaustic, he then transfers a printout of each complete pattern, which fills the entire grid, to a wood panel. What arises is what cellular automata inherently generate--an enormously complex pattern, created by the application of a remarkably simple equation. "This is precisely what Wolfram suggested in his book A New Kind of Science - the use of cellular automata for the creation of bristling complexity from simple formulas, which offers the promise of new, simple theories for physics, biology, computer science, and mathematics. In their pure state, the boxes of cellular automata are filled by numerical values, and only a mathematician can recognize the patterns of complexity they reveal - to the rest of us, they appear to be merely numbers distributed at random. However, in Purdy's paintings, the use of colors makes the patterns visible to everyone." |
Richard Purdy, "168", 2004, encaustic on plywood, x inches |
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Richard Purdy, "146", 2004, encaustic on plywood, x inches |
"The patterns, made visible, are revealed to be breathtakingly beautiful - and it is beauty with a meaning. In the complex balance of the works, in the variety of disposition of the color displays, you can see exactly what is at hand: you witness both the regularity of the law the computer has followed and the astonishment of the unexpected results when that law is put into play. You see the point of the theory of cellular automata: not as a theoretical construct legible only to specialists, but as an idea put into action, as a thought made real, as a concept turned to life. You see not what the idea is but what the idea means - what difference it makes when, through art, it is carried into the world. "This is the difference between knowledge and understanding, between comprehension and appreciation. In these works, Richard Purdy is displaying the living implications of one area of the most advanced scientific thought of our time." |
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Richard Purdy was born in Chicago in 1956. He received his B.F.A. from Indiana University of Pennsylvania in Indiana, Pennsylvania. His work has been shown at Art Resources Transfer, New York; Campo & Campo, Antwerp, Belgium; The Drawing Center, New York; Flint Institute of Arts, Michigan; Jones Center for Contemporary Art, Austin, Texas; Kunstverein Grafschaft, Bentheim, Germany; Selby Gallery, Ringling School of Art and Design, Sarasota, Florida; Vedanta Gallery, Chicago. Richard Purdy resides in New York. |
 Richard Purdy, "70", 2005, encaustic on wood, 17 1/2 x 17 1/2 inches |
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Installation
and Opening Reception in May 2000
Richard Purdy's Exhibition in May 2000