Close Packed Structures

Gildar Gallery is pleased to announce Clark Richert’s solo exhibition Close Packed Structures opening Friday, November 11th and running through December 23, 2016. In this survey of new and historical painting, Richert explores a longstanding interest in visual experimentation using repeating forms. With implications across multiple fields of study, in this collection, the artist's attention turns towards the stacking of structures into dense arrangements of efficiency. 

Close-packed structures, for which the exhibition is named, are most commonly known within geometry as the means of clustering spheres and octahedrons together in the tightest configurations possible. In a vacuum Geometry implies a type of mathematical perfection. However, reality is rarely made-up of such ideal circumstances. Richert’s work engages in the unresolved territory of imperfection and imagination.  While Richert’s paintings may appear as exacting diagrams, each surface bares the evidence of a willfully imperfect hand at work. Drips, smears and strokes emerge within the seemingly hard-edged and vibrant compositions implying that even the most rigorous endeavors bare the evidence of human subjectivity. 

The computational elements within the works, while deeply informed by empirical inquiry, are themselves applied with open-ended curiosity.  In this optically inclined series, Richert often utilizes the method of overlapping layers of pattern as a way of visually presenting questions about the relationships between repetition in various fields  from mathematics and chemistry to physics. These visual hypothesis unbound by the burden of proof, yet wholly open to the process (one of Richert’s earliest painting inquiries of tessellating forms was later discovered to exist mathematically, as well as chemically in the natural world), embrace both discipline and creative license as a means of investigating worlds scene and unseen around us.