Tom Loveday, The Fourth Dimension

Mais Wright Gallery, 2024

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see, https://www.maiswright.com/artists/tom-loveday/tom-loveday-exhibitions/

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Art conjures presence, but of what?

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I {want] to bring about some fresh way of seeing again what had already almost certainly been experienced, but which had been either dismissed or buried by the passage of time; that thrill of pleasure that sight itself reveals.

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Colour is the proper means for what I want to do because it is prone to inflections and inductions existing only through relationship; malleable yet tough and resilient. I do not seek single colours but rather pairs, triads or groups of colour …

(Bridget Riley (Robert Kudielka ed), The Eye’s Mind, Bridget Riley, Collected Writings, 1965-1999, Thames and Hudson, p. 33.)

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In geometry, four-dimensional space appears by counting 1, 2 and 3 lines in a sequence equally separated by 90 degrees to each other. The result is the very familiar three axes of spatial geometry. This counting of the axes inevitably leads the imagination to ask if there could be more numbers, lines or more dimensions.

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However, adding another line that maintains the rule that all axes must be at 90 degrees to each other, is rather tricky. Where does this new dimension go? This makes imagining four-dimensional geometry in “reality” quite difficult (but not impossible as I have explained elsewhere.) Instead of trying to add another line, let’s suppose that the fourth dimension can be a line of colour added to the first three dimensions. We could call this colour line a “Cline” as I did in a theoretical paper in the late 1990s. (The term Cline refers to a gradual change over distance and time, especially in the surface temperature of the ocean. My Cline is a gradual change over distance and time in colour.)

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Calling a Colour line (or “Cline”) a fourth dimension avoids the problem of where the fourth dimension is to be placed. Indeed, colour becomes a quality of all the first three lines in much the same way as each dimension adds a dimensional quality to the other dimension lines but without affecting them in quantity. Adding the Cline simply makes a three-dimensional space four dimensional.

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However, this is a difficult proposition in painting because colour as mostly regarded as the creator of confusion in an otherwise colourless cosmos. Colour upsets the pure black and white representation of pure abstract geometry by changing its spatial reading – colours, among other things, recede and advance differently to the strict geometry of linear perspective. In European painting, this meant that drawing was regarded as more basic than colour – something to be wary of and taught after drawing. “atmospheric colour” needed to be bound to the rule of perspective otherwise art was in chaos. To see the fourth dimension in these works, one needs another idea.

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This idea exists in understanding the difference between the simple geometry explanation of the fourth dimension and its popular culture reception. The term “dimension” becomes a space in the popular culture. Various authors and film makers have used the fourth dimension as a space from which mystery and danger emerges because such a space is the great unknowable. Films such as Forbidden Planet, for example build hysterical ideas about “the invisible” from the fourth dimension as a menace upon the invisible.

However, this elision of a dimension line and a space can be a productive approach to making art. If we say that each painting is a pictorial dimension, then each painting can be thought of as one of dimensions that make up a space. Indeed, each pictorial space is a geometrically coloured “line” that when place in an axial relationship with three other paintings, creates a four-dimensional space.

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So now we have two ideas: colour as a dimension line and a painting as a spatial dimension: The doubling of the quadruple. This leads to the next step in this exhibition: the four-panel works are four, four-dimensional spaces at 90 degrees to each other. From there, why not have multi-dimensional spaces, for this exhibition, 15 four-dimensional panels?

I fear, dear reader, I may have lost you with all this peculiar geometric chatter along with some odd idea about colour, pictoriality, metaphor and other difficulties inflected by various ancient ideas about art and thought such as Nominalism. I hope though that the works speak at some level, for themselves – offering a feeling about two of the most primary features of human existence: geometry and colour, out of which presence appears in systems of aesthetics. For me, this is how art conjures the presence of human civilisation itself, something way may be in dire need of soon.