“Richard Kallweit: Early Works” showcases sculptures, paintings, and drawings made in the 1970s and ’80s. Kallweit, one of the original Criss-Cross artists, presents rigorous mathematical concepts in acrylic, ink, Plexiglas, graph paper, and wood. Up close, the five canvases here are bright grids of dots and squares, but farther away they tessellate as we eke out patterns. The six sculptures are reminiscent of crystals or atomic structures—but Kallweit isn’t as interested in matter as he is with the mechanics underlying it. His objects are impeccably constructed representations of equations, fractals—what we’d call algorithms today.
Criss-Cross came out of Drop City, the artist community near Trinidad, Colorado, founded in the 1960s. “Droppers” were interested in structure and pattern, especially seen in the way they built their domed Buckyball homes. Patterns are fundamental aspects of the world, even to our experience of it. A hallmark of animal consciousness is “pattern recognition”; without it, we couldn’t understand language or recognize each other.
In works such as the acrylic-on-canvas 5,4,5,4,5, 1980, and the plywood sculpture Escher’s Ladder, 1984, Kallweit investigates the blueprint of reality: The fractal design underpinning his art is the fundamental structure behind matter, in which the viewer innately recognizes patterns. But seeing his work in 2023, when mathematics influences—or in many ways determines—our lives through the algorithmic, the show becomes even more existential. Nine Square Seed, 1978, an energetic, yellow-and-green grid painting that almost flows before the eyes like a nonstop CNN chyron, can’t help but allude to how humanity is at the behest of its own inventiveness. Or maybe that’s just this reviewer’s pattern recognition talking.
— Sommer Browning