“Richard Kallweit: Early Works” features sculptures, paintings and drawings made in the 1970s and 1980s. Kallweit, one of the original Criss-Cross artists, presents rigorous mathematical concepts in acrylic, ink, plexiglass, graph paper and wood. Up close, the five webs here are luminous grids of dots and squares, but further away they transform into patterns. The six sculptures are reminiscent of crystals or atomic structures, but Kallweit is not so much interested in matter as in the mechanics behind it. Its objects are impeccably constructed representations of equations, fractals – what today we would call algorithms.
Criss-Cross grew out of Drop City, the community of artists near Trinidad, Colorado founded in the 1960s. “Droppers” were interested in structure and pattern, particularly in how they built their domed Buckyball homes. Patterns are fundamental aspects of the world, even to our experience of it. A feature of animal consciousness is “pattern recognition”; without it, we could not understand language or recognize ourselves.
In works such as acrylic on canvas 5,4,5,4,51980, and the plywood sculpture The Escher scale, 1984, Kallweit investigates the blueprint of reality: the fractal design underlying his art is the fundamental structure behind matter, in which the viewer naturally recognizes patterns. But seeing his work in 2023, when mathematics influences – or in many ways determines – our lives through algorithmics, the spectacle becomes even more existential. Seed of nine squares, 1978, an energetic yellow and green grid painting that flows almost before the eyes like an uninterrupted CNN chyron, can’t help but allude to how humanity is at the mercy of its own inventiveness. Or maybe it’s just this reviewer’s pattern recognition talking.
