Roni Horn’s small drawing from 1985 is a field of deep red pigment, embedded with an even darker red. A searing white form penetrates the field from below. The drawing could be read as a narrative, but not only in this way.

In a series of drawings made from the 1980s into the last decade, Horn used hand-rubbed pigments, varnish, and sliced sections of paper precisely abutted to one another to evolve a technique that in and of itself engenders an essential tension. Her drawings from the 1980s tend to deconstruct form and to consider how multiple points of view inform perception. Horn challenges the notion of an absolute condition by altering form in the process of its own making. How these drawings make that notion visible is a piece of magic.

The drawing on view here is a kind of figure/ground inversion of Horn’s spliced works from the 1980s. This beautiful little piece seems to stand in opposition to the spliced works—being, in a sense, what the others are not.

a sliver
a split
a wedge
a crack and an abyss
a deep crevice that disappears in a field around it
an edge that is torn
an overlap that creates scale
a technique that challenges Cubism
a surface that expands
a lineage that is hidden
a radiance that penetrates

Later drawings, which incorporate this pigment and splicing technique as well as string-like forms, have become increasingly fragmented and complex. Horn seems to propose the impossibility of any comprehensive view, while relishing in the play of abundance.

From a distance the uniform yet undulating waves in Lynne Woods Turner’s graphite and tea-stained drawing appear soft and delicate. Underlying the waves, a precisely gridded structure is not initially apparent, but as one comes in closer or zooms in, a penciled-in pattern of circles constructed along a grid can be seen to account for the movement within the waves.

Turner’s work can be dauntingly complex, even for a fellow geometrician. Its initial complexity raises the question of whether to approach the work by trying to understand the details of its construction or by simply allowing oneself to experience the effect it creates.

Variations in the density of the tea-stained waves play off the regularity of the rows of circles, each of whose centers lies on its neighbor’s circumference. Glancing over the field of waves, the underlying center/circumference dialectic emerges as its core, bringing to mind “an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere.”

Most often attributed to Blaise Pascal, the metaphor traces its origins to the Pre-Socratics, to Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Empedocles, and can be found resonating through the 12th to the 16th and 17th centuries. In “Pascal’s Sphere,” Jorge Luis Borges writes, “It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors.” The infinite sphere, in its various permutations with their attendant shifts in meaning, has been used variously to describe God, Nature or the Universe.

In an earlier draft of his manuscript, it can be seen that Pascal considered describing the sphere as fearful rather than infinite, but ultimately chose the latter. A closer look into the way Turner uses these terms reveals that the circumference is not nowhere, but touching at every center, which in turn lies on the circumference of its neighbor. The rich layering of circles and centers creates a kind of net or woven fabric that undulates with the waves in motion, while the geometry of the circles remains fixed on a plane.

It might be that an infinite number of metaphors can be drawn from these relations, but none is more relevant here than the contemporary paradox of the dual nature of light as both particle and wave. We cannot focus on both at the same time.

Setting these classic terms in her own order, so that their concurrence binds them in structuring a field, Turner creates a place where the interrelationship of elements takes precedence over hierarchy and time is absolute. Recalling the dialectics of the Greeks, who argued as to whether matter was fixity or flux, she presents an index that is both familiar and of her own making.