Selected exhibitions
Notes on entropy, at Arcadia Missa(2020)
This is a group exhibition on the theme of entropy. From the perspective of these artists, entropy is presented in a variety of ways in their works. While viewing their works, I wondered how they interpreted entropy, related it to their own artworks, and presented it?
So I chose some of the artists I was interested in to further my understanding and study on entropy.
Renata Boero
Renata Boero's works 'Cromogramma' were born from the folding process, using unique natural elements to achieve texture and colour on canvas through methods such as soaking and boiling. The aim of these acts was to reformulate the process of living in the making of the work, as a ritual practice. And she entrusted these works to time and nature to observe the changes in colour and texture. The entropy of the artwork increases over time, either by light or by man, and the work continues to change, perhaps one day to a completely different colour or to some natural deposit, which is what I find so appealing about this series of works.
Renata Boero, Cromogramma, 1977, Natural elements, canvas, 145 × 85 cm
Renata Boero, Cromogramma, 1978, Natural elements, canvas, 131 × 96 cm
Alina Perez
Alina's work gives the illusion of oil painting when viewed from a distance or through a screen, but is actually detailed with charcoal and pastel etchings. The images explore how we recall dark moments of the past and the accuracy of our memories. Selecting elements from the past and present to create new images that blur reality and imagination, the blurred or transparent figures in the work sometimes represent memories of the past and other times a blurred reality or imagination, and in this way the artist creates a tense and dynamic combination of history and the present. In my interpretation, memories in the mind fade into obscurity and even disappear with the passage of time. The artist constructs images by restoring them from the depths of memory to recreate them, an act of entropy reduction.
Papi with Lizard Earrings Smooshing Cocuyos,
2020，
Charcoal and pastel on paper,
134 × 104 cm
Sending Them Off,
2020,
Charcoal on paper,
134 × 104 cm
Horse Power,
2020,
Charcoal on paper,
134 × 104 cm
Reference
group exhibition 'Notes on entropy' : https://arcadiamissa.com/notes-on-entropy/
Artist website: https://alinaperez.com
Selected books
Rudolf Arnheim, Entropy and Art : An Essay on disorder and Order
In this passage, the author uses the law of entropy, which reflects a pessimistic view of life, to describe the life process of a work of art: the many possibilities for a painting to be destroyed, either by man or by the natural environment. In my opinion, the author likens the work of art to a living organism, a work of art that is already on its way to destruction from its inception. Like human life, it is born to death. That is, from order to disorder, yet the definition of order and disorder is ambiguous. Reverse entropy and entropy represent the 'creation' from disorder to order and the 'destruction' from order to disorder respectively. This brings me to the motivation for this unit, which is to explore the orderliness of non-living things through the study of inverse entropy.
About 1930 the pictures torn by hand from paper came into being. Human work now seemed to me even less than piece-work. It seemed to me removed from life. Everything is approximate, less than approximate, for when moreclosely and sharply examined, the most perfect picture is a warty, threadbare approximation, a dry porridge, a dismal moon-crater landscape. What arrogance is concealed in perfection. Why struggle for precision, purity, when they can never be attained. The decay that begins immediately on completion of the work was now welcome to me. Dirty man with his dirty fingers points and daubs at a nuance in the picture. This spot is henceforth marked by sweat and grease. He breaks into wild enthusiasm and sprays the picture with spittle. A delicate paper collage of watercolor is lost. Dust and insects are also efficient in destruction. The light fades the colors. Sun and heat make blisters, disinte- grate the paper, crack the paint, disintegrate the paint. The dampness creates mould. The work falls apart, dies. The dying of a picture no longer brought me to despair. I had made my pact with its passing, with its death, and now it was part of the picture for me. But death grew and ate up the picture and life. This dissolution must have been followed by the negation of au action. Form had become unform, the Finite the Infinite, the Individual the Whole.
Excerpts from 15. ART MADE SIMPLE，P.44
Reference
Rudolf,A, Entropy and Art: An Essay on Disorder and Order (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1970)
Erwin Schrodinger, What is Life?
The author makes the first famous statement in this passage that life feeds on negative entropy. Having read it, I currently have two understandings of entropy reduction: one is to control time and return to the previous or original state by turning back time. But this is too idealistic, and not possible in real life. The second is that in the natural flow of time, living beings retard the increase of entropy by constantly doing work on themselves, and correspondingly achieving entropy reduction. Self-creation, for example, is also a kind of entropy-reducing movement. It follows that negative entropy is something very positive. The very thing on which the organism depends is negative entropy.
It is by avoiding the rapid decay into the inert state of 'equilibrium' that an organism appears so enigmatic; so much so, that from the earliest times of human thought some special non-physical or supernatural force (vis viva, entelechy) was claimed to be operative in the organism, and in some quarters is still claimed. How does the living organism avoid decay? The obvious answer is: By eating, drinking, breathing and (in the case of plants) assimilating. The technical term is metabolism. The Greek word means change or exchange. Exchange of what? Originally the underlying idea is, no doubt, exchange of material. (E.g. the German for metabolism is Stoffwechsel.) That the exchange of material should be the essential thing is absurd. Any atom of nitrogen, oxygen, sulphur, etc., is as good as any other of its kind; what could be gained by exchanging them? For a while in the past our curiosity was silenced by being told that we feed upon energy. In some very advanced country (I don't remember whether it was Germany or the U.S.A. or both) you could find menu cards in restaurants indicating, in addition to the price, the energy content of every dish. Needless to say, taken Needless to say, taken literally, this is just as absurd. For an adult organism the energy content is as stationary as the material content. Since, surely, any calorie is worth as much as any other calorie, one cannot see how a mere exchange could help. What then is that precious something contained in our food which keeps us from death? That is easily answered. Every process, event, happening -call it what you will; in a word, everything that is going on in Nature means an increase of the entropy of the part of the world where it is going on. Thus a living organism continually increases its entropy -or, as you may say, produces positive entropy -and thus tends to approach the dangerous state of maximum entropy, which is of death. It can only keep aloof from it, i.e. alive, by continually drawing from its environment negative entropy -which is something very positive as we shall immediately see. What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy. Or, to put it less paradoxically, the essential thing in metabolism is that the organism succeeds in freeing itself from all the entropy it cannot help producing while alive.
Excerpts from Chapter 6 IT FEEDS ON 'NEGATIVE ENTROPY'
Reference
Erwin,S, What is Life? Cambridge: University Press.1944