Rick Hildebrandt’s Bull With a Hypertextural Charge
By Lee Klein
Rick Hildebrandt
When the time came me to curate an exhibit at the Florence Lynch gallery on the yet to be completely defined concept of "Hypertexture" I asked artist Rick Hildebrandt to create a work in accordance with it. Naturally, this incited an exploration of the term itself – no small feat: The virtual and partial symbolic representation for and replacement of the physical elements of human life are monumental alterations to the nature in which those with access and or witness to technology interact with and within the universe. As the members of our species engage in and between simulated and physical realities, the pictures that our perception form of the tangible elements of existence fluctuate and change. Artists’ and viewers’ respective expressions and or understanding of physical reality in the fine and applied arts in physical space and cyberspace evolve. Summarily, one of the phenomenological progressions in this relatively new inter-dimensional dialectic addresses how painterly and digital textures emerge with the facility of one paradigm translated into the dimension of another. These visually hyphenated hybrid forms are "Hypertexture."
Herein, the painter took his own symbolic currency of a bull and placed the animal on another constant in his visually economy a grid. The artist then slanted the bas-relief architecture of this work sideways with the panels of the grid slightly separated by speckled apertures.
I interpreted the work’s format to indicate the concept of’ transmittal, as the original artistic images were transposed into the computer and then back out again into the physical world, now re-manifest in a tactile state. This work, Pau seems related to a particular piece by Turkish artist Cem Arik. Though, the Near Eastern artist’s work referenced the ancient tile art of mosaic’s ability to respond to computer generations (as compared to Hildebrandt’s piece, which is again a bas-relief imitative of computer graphics), it can be said that the two have used a slightly differing means towards similar ends.
One cannot use chaos to explain chaos. Hildebrandt return to mans’ primitive beginnings to allow us to begin to reposition ourselves, aligned with the age old in an age of blurry disorder. It follows, then, that the motif for this painterly dialogue for the artist in "Pauquot; as in many of his works is a bull.
In the emergent definition of the word hypertexture Hildebrandt has a clear, concise vision of where his work stands in relation to the ideas being discussed as both a commentary and an as an extant work of art. Further towards the concept of transmittal, the cow, in its rematerialization reminds me of a softer bovine, Marc Chagall’s cow of the Paris sky over the Eiffel tower. Hildebrandt’s primal cow makes a quantum leap, or in effect, an Eiffel tower of visual progression.
Meanwhile Mr. Hildebrandt uses the grid form to reinterpret both iconic western works and media images.
Then to sharpen the blade for the ongoing engagement of the tactile versus the intangible in a dialectic this writer again likes to call "Hypertexture" which also includes in its outlay a constant go around a cull de sac to swing back around trademarks dissolving the unborn future language of progression in the quicksand of its own then resurrected remarket it into another medium precisely through the sparkling essence of diamonds back to an adjective from a known and a plurality from a morphic plurality to a singularity to a duality to another step in mans ever growing consciousness The fractalization here embodies the chaos of the intermediacy for the reading of the work however this writer hopes that this artist will throw in greater references to the actual paint effecting hypertexture as to ground the space between the ideas more concretely for the viewer.
