Higher harmony: Patrick Pincus at Acre’s Blue Bird Gallery
If one looks at the “canvases” and sculptures of Pincus, one will see biomorphic forms, cellular structures and organism.
By DANIEL SHORKENDPatrick Pincus uses collage like elements in his work (photo credit: MOSHE AVUTA)
It’s been a few weeks since my last visit to the splendid Old City in Acre and specifically to the bastion of art there – the Blue Bird Gallery. Moshe Afuta has recently opened this gallery space and has plans to open a few more galleries along the alley in the Turkish Bazaar together with the first kosher restaurant in the area. There is great potential here and perhaps it will teem with life and artistic delight comparable to the Old City of Safed soon. The Blue Bird gallery shifts and changes as different artists are showcased, sometimes with a specific focus on one artist.In this case it is the work of Patrick Pincus, who spends half his time in Israel and the other half in France. He has exhibited widely and the influence of his scientific knowledge as a medical doctor is evident. This is a highly interesting marriage that finds aesthetic appeal. For if one looks at the “canvases” and sculptures of Pincus, one will see biomorphic forms, cellular structures and organism, DNA strands and the like – all given a most colorful, dancing -like, musical quality. The building blocks of matter dance to a higher harmony – both to the laws of science, of order and yet indeterminism and the harmonic strings of color, pattern, line, texture and scale.His recurring motif is a girl or woman who flies, Chagall-like, with candles inspiring her flight as she moves between worlds. Such worlds or levels are indicated by the relief, collage-like elements as the two-dimensional and three-dimensional form – a most interesting dialectical exchange. The worlds of dream and fantasy, of rising into space and the starry sky couple with the material reality of the body, the very dust and matter of the stars, but also designed according to logical sequencing.In fact, we share the bulk of our DNA with other life forms, even plants, so the picture of interconnected oneness and unity may be perceived as mystical, but also as the mystical materializes as dense matter. Yet such matter is transformed into a glittering surface and a sense of holy reverie.Pincus’s sculptures are equally fascinating as he makes violins for example with heavy surface texture, a colorful ode to music and the scientific sense of cosmos as contained in equations and laws. Such music then manifests beauty, and art may be construed as a surface for a concept such as beauty. It is a beauty not simply in the esoterica or as number sequencing, but also the here and now. As we notice the surface of the musical instruments, these sculptures appear to have or be like gum wrapping.This implies that beauty encompasses and runs through as it were both the abstract and the design of a gum wrapper! Art motivates egalitarianism. Such a reading is strengthened by another artist that is given due attention in these most interesting, vault-like spaces, namely David Gerstein.Gerstein’s sculptures, part three-dimensional and partly two-dimensional, are well crafted what I call odes to the banal. It’s pop art effect – shiny, colored metallic surfaces – motivate, I believe, the viewer to transcend one’s petty and trivial concerns as energetic, shiny lines and colors titillate the senses, creating a rhythmic dance, and thus facilitating a means to shift one’s self-absorption into a certain awe at that which is revealed (that is matter itself or matter transformed into or as art). I invite all with an interest in the Old City of Acre and art to pay a visit and watch the space.BLUE BIRD GALLERY RevisitedTurkish Bazaar,Old City, Acre
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