Clark Richert

Since the mid-1970's, when I was involved with the artist's group "Criss-Cross", a recurring theme in my work has been "the structure of space". In the 1960's I became aware of a theory postulated by Buckminster Fuller that the universe is suspended in a state of tension - taut, like a stretched canvas. I imagined that the expansion of the universe exerted a continual outward tension on space, preventing its collapse.
This led me to another question. By rigorously employing a methodology complementary to the Minimalist's "elimination of all that is not essential", can I systematically re-introduce through an additive process "only that which is essential"? Can I, out of nothingness, rebuild (by the bootstaps, so to speak), an implicit somethingness, without introducing superfluous elements? Space, I deduced, like a stretched canvas before it is painted, might have an invisible underlying structure. This is known in painting as the "felt axes"-the idea that a painting format has an inherent "felt" structure, consisting of the vertical, horizontal and diagonal axes.

I put these ideas to a test in my paintings. Step one involved this comparison: As the dimensionality of the number system is embedded (or "folded up") in "zero", so must the dimensionality of "space" be "folded up" in nothingness. Thus, unfolding nothingness gave me something to work with-SPACE.

I then asked, are there implicit structural aspects of space*? My conclusion was: Yes! Applying the Bauhaus principle "form follows function", I formulated the following axioms:
1. Space is isometric-that is, equally extended in each dimension. This provided for me the rationale for the square canvas-the vertical axis should not be favored over the horizontal, nor the horizontal over the vertical.
2. Space is homogeneous-it is structurally the same throughout. This suggests a non-hierarchical democratic "all-over" approach to composition-no square inch of the canvas should be prioritized over another.
3. Space is given to economic relationships-as in Euclidian space, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line; structural relationships should be accomplished as economically as possible.

Extrapolating from Buckminster Fuller's idea of "structural building blocks of the universe", this led to the postulation of "space quanta", that space is comprised of infinitesimal cells packed tightly together in a three-dimensional lattice. Furthermore, these "space-quanta would have to enclose space as economically as possible. Since there are only three possible isometric structures that will "close pack" in 3-D space (the cube, the rhombic dodecahedron and the truncated octahedron, [which pack like stacked grapefruit in a supermarket display]), the "space-quanta would have to be truncated octahedra, since of the three options, they enclose space most economically.

This led to a discovery-that the numbers of concentric shells in the truncated octahedral (T-O) packing, surprisingly, bear a one to one correspondence with the periods in the periodic table of the chemicals (1, 8, 18, 32 x 2). My conclusion was that implicit in the structure of space are the physical elements*. Somethingness out of nothingness!



*There is flat "Euclidian Space" and curved "Einsteinian Space" - I postulated a new type of space: "Z-Space" - comprised of sets of parallel "zones".