Andrew Christofides 2012

By Andrew Frost

Andrew Christofides’s show at King Street Gallery on William comes with the somewhat laborious title 2012 Relief Constructions and Works on Paper. Although the title might lack poetic spark it’s an entirely appropriate description of the works within – carefully constructed geometric patterns derived from the permutations of numbers, built from acrylic, card and plastic.

Much like Christofides’s larger-scale paintings on canvas where the pattern suggests a visual logic behind their making, these more intimate pieces delicately balance their visual affect between the unmediated and beautiful visual field of the mathematically-derived pattern such the mandelbrot set, and the more intuitive but equally exacting tradition of geometric abstract painting.

The effect of a pattern on the human eye produces a physical response. The most extreme of these are patterns that produce optical after-effects. But even the simplest of patterns also induce an involuntary physical response in the viewer and when combined with limited variation in the pattern, the viewer’s brain attempts a kind of ‘decoding’ as it attempts to comprehend the sequence of the variations. In these works Christofides’s artful patterns provoke both the involuntarily physical and the more apparent cognitive responses – and for reasons that are obscure, there’s a gentle humour in the works. That little recurring dot is there for a reason, but its presence makes you smile.

Until November 24

King Street gallery on William, Darlinghurst

www.kingstreetgallery.com.au