"Blots, Blobs & Splashes," University of Louisville, 2005

I don't think I ever linked to the essay on my work that was written on the occasion of my 2005 show at the Belknap Gallery, University of Louisville.

Here is the text of the essay, by U of L art history professor Jay Kloner:

AN APPRECIATION

Andrei Molotiu writes imagery in the visual language of Hokusai, Pollock, Adobe Photoshop and comics. He brings together high and low, tradition and deconstruction, Zen and analysis, mapping and chaos by erasing their differences in multi-dimensional frames of time, space and form. As a result he takes us on a voyage where we can see facets and emblems of adaptive energy flows in Animism and science.

He has profound respect for excellence of graphic marking, which can be viewed as primal writing. His handling of ink ranges from Zen immediacy to deliberate care in remaking cold computer contours into breathing lines. He employs Pollock's expressive currents and chance inventions of computer transformations.

His interest in Hokusai is part of his broader appreciation of Asian art and its deeply held beliefs about the preeminence of nature. The life force in Hokusai's renderings of energy in all things, among other sources, moves him to value new techniques for recreating experience. These are techniques developed in Chinese and Japanese art over centuries of time. Frames are not frames but margins, leading to other margins. Objects are points of reference in a continuum of references. This is a cinematic recital in books, which ultimately evolves into forms of film and video.

He is fascinated in differing perspectives with the entire spectrum of comics, which he collects and integrates, consciously and unconsciously, with his own art. It is not an accident that most Japanese prints were perceived in their own country, in their own day, as roughly comparable to our view of comics or advertising today. It is also not accidental that he is drawn to original renderings of comic strips where the incredible, and unappreciated, control of pen and brush is sophisticated.

Andrei Molotiu has developed an aesthetic theory where beauty is inherent in the process of deconstruction. New perceptions grow out of absences, and beauty informs becoming. Art outside the canon can open observations in previous voids. An example of this is the way comics disclose new changing spaces across frames. Different continuities of space and form, across neighboring frames, create multiple dimensions and simultaneities of space-time. These contradict normal experiences of narrative, expanding perception.

These increased dimensions reflect a realm of fluid time akin to elisions in Mallarmé's poetry or Bergson's sense of duration. They also reflect Chinese and Japanese landscape rendering where absence is more important and presence, and possibilities are more significant than definitions. Zen enters these streams of becoming, which Andrei Molotiu inflects with all the new process theories of interconnectedness in experience and the world.

Jay Kloner
October 2005