The Dream Membrane David Chaim Smith By KEN JOHNSON David Chaim Smith’s densely worked, diagrammatic drawings look as if they had been made by a Renaissance-era occultist. A student of the Jewish kabbalah, alchemy and other mystical theories and practices as well as an artist with a 1989 Master of Fine Arts degree from Columbia University, Mr. Smith began executing fascinatingly articulated, chartlike drawings in pencil and black ink in 2007 after a decade of retirement from art-making. These semi-abstract, symmetrical compositions feature an interplay between narrow crisscrossing, circular and serpentine bands and gnarly, rootlike or veiny systems. Pieces of laboratory equipment, trumpets, crowns, six-pointed stars and other symbols are also woven into the drawings. On a strictly visual level they have a mesmerizing spatial complexity. Mr. Smith’s works are made not just to look at; they are meant to be read too. Finely printed words on a ribbon outlining a central beaker on the left-hand page of an epical triptych called “Three Stages to Seal Nullification” declare: “Mind is a ceaselessly emanating river which disappears as it grows stronger to manifest our precious ocean of phenomena as continually beginning anew as infinite variation unending in beauty.” Whether this sort of thing will collapse your usual dualistic experience of mind and body, nature and culture, the sacred and the profane, the one and the many and so on into an ecstatic merging with God-as-universal-consciousness probably depends on the meditative effort you put into it. In any case, as cosmic visions and philosophical fantasies, Mr. Smith’s drawings are entertaining and poetically hair-raising. KEN JOHNSON
Posted on: Sat, 15 Mar 2014 13:14:25 +0000