Blinky Palermo

To the People of New York City :

The greatest painting of the second half of the 20th century. All other installations that group discrete paintings or objects which are meant to be read as a single work, particularly those of minimalists like Judd, rely on a smooth symmetry. This work achieves its power via symmetry breaking.

Narratives mapped over time in the same sense as Japanese emaki are unusual in Western Art. Pop art abstracted images from the true narratives of comic books into a time independent version. Time as the main element in a painting has been elusive because ordinary boundary conditions do not permit it. Palermo, in a rough approximation of the holographic principle, surrounds a volume with a lower-dimensional boundary to create a strongly disrupted narrative in the bulk. The boundary condition itself is built rather simply from repetitions of small highly chromatic matrices.