(Exhibition catalog essay, January, 2006)

The diptych has art historical roots that reach back for centuries. The coupling of two distinct yet related images has long been used to produce a visual dialogue – a sort of call and response that we witness, for example, in countless Annunciation scenes from the Renaissance. Macyn Bolt has explored this format for several years now. In small panels of equivalent dimensions, creating tablet-like supports that efficiently contrast painting and collage, abstraction and representation, precise geometric form and chance painterly incident. While this litany of categories suggests an interest in polarities, Bolt rarely traffics in exclusive absolutes. His pictorial languages tend to converse as much as they oppose each other.

Advancing this project, Bolt has recently reconceived the diptych format in his Cambiata Figures, which were begun in 2004. Distinguished by their insistent horizontality, these long, narrow and seemingly continuous works are in fact fashioned from two rectangular panels. While each unit is the same length, Bolt otherwise toys with their dimensions, playing thickness against thinness and high relief against low. These sculptural contrasts are complicated by varied surface treatments. Uniform zones of painted color are foiled by passages of collage. Non-objective abstraction is countered by snippets of found photographs, magazines and bureaucratic documents – the abundant and banal dross of everyday like run through a paper shredder.

Many viewers will respond to this spliced and scrambled visual information by inspecting these works up close. When standing before a Cambiata Figure, one’s peripheral vision is stimulated. The eyes shuttle from side to side, taking note of the numerous formal contrasts yet somehow sensing a remarkable equipoise. Respecting the unique demands of a diptych, Bolt continues to pursue balance in these new works. But now the balance is more complex and quite active, a fluid exchange of visual points and counterpoints that never full comes to a rest. I find this balance analogous to a moving seesaw, rather than the static and final decision of a scale.

An obscure yet fitting title for this body of work, cambiata figure is a Baroque musical term that describes notes that interrupt and suspend the resolution of a melody. When I first unearthed this definition, I began to read Bolt’s new diptychs in a rather literal fashion. The long, rectangular panels, which are often further subdivided into thin geometric bands, suddenly seemed to echo the staffs and bar lines used in music notation. Later, when I learned that Bolt had played various percussion instruments as a child, and remains an enthusiast of improvisational jazz, I was tempted to root his new work in these aspects of his biography. But in the final analysis, these connections are extraneous, even irrelevant. The Cambiata Figures may indeed relate to music, but the relationship is best described as synesthetic.

By invoking synesthesia in this short essay on Bolt’s art, I may be risking interpretative overreach. But I do believe that music provides a useful analogy for his recent work. For music demands a durational experience. One can only grasp its rhythms and harmonies by listening through time. Similarly, by attenuating the traditional diptych, by literally stretching this standard format to its breaking point, Bolt frustrates any prompt and finite recognition of binary opposition. He presents, instead, an ongoing dialogue of pictorial languages across these slender supports. For every call there is a response; for every response there is yet another call. The exquisite and perplexing balance of the Cambiata Figures may not be quickly understood, but it is eventually experienced.

Matthew Guy Nichols is an art historian and critic who lives in Brooklyn, NY.