COVID-19
I’m as OCD as the next art critic, so I can stare at Eli Bornowsky’s paintings for hours. That’s what I’d be doing if his exhibition at King’s Leap Projects in New York City hadn’t been postponed due to the quarantine. Likewise I peacefully zone out in the presence of Islamic tiles; I obsessively play Sudoku and Scrabble; I loved MC Escher prints as a teenager; I would give a lung for some De Stijl furniture; and when hard-pressed I will spend an hour or two meticulously filling in a page in a coloring book. Why my inclinations are pertinent is in their relationship to Bornowsky’s carefully marked egg tempera patterns, with their playful mathematical obsessiveness and idiosyncratic color schemes. Six-pointed stars overlaid with circles in shades of mint, ochre, navy and dusty rose; triangles arranged into hexagons, some filled with a curve, mystifyingly shaded in black, white, pale pink, red and various shades of aqua. But what do they mean? Please. Nobody asks such things of Delannoy numbers or Rietveld chairs. The fact that some kind of system, some set of rules, underlies their beauty is enough.
—Lori Waxman 2020-06-27 11:27 PM