A mug rests upside down on a tall pedestal; a paper cutout of an irregular polygon is pasted to its base. A similar shape reappears as cutouts glued to the feet of an overturned chair. In a drawing hanging from binder clips, the polygon is again repeated, painted in gestural strokes within a delicate graphite border. In explaining his affirmation in an interview that “seeing is an act,” Croatian artist Goran Petercol cites Denis Diderot’s Letters to the Blind for Those with Vision: “We do not see anything the first time we use our eyes.” At first, Petercol’s exhibition, titled “Side Wind,” is simply a mug, a chair, and a drawing, and as such is what Diderot calls “a multitude of confused senses” that can be “disentangled only . . . through constant deliberation about what is going on within ourselves.” Thus, with further looking, the chair’s white legs become elements in a geometric abstraction. Appearing as if painted into the gallery’s gray shadows, they seem like line segments whose endpoints are the four black polygons that act as coordinates in space. As elements of previous works transposed onto the new, the polygons on the chair derive from forms cut around the mug’s photographed profile; the cutout on the mug’s base is a shape the artist discovered in the development of a previous installation. And just as nothing starts from zero, there is no empty space. In the gallery’s third room, a bedside table is illuminated from within to highlight the “interspace” hidden in its drawers. Nearby, a misted-glass sphere, also lit from within, blinds the viewer positioned directly before a hole at its center. The shock of sudden blindness recalls Petercol’s statement that “seeing is an act”—not passive reception but active process involving both mind and body.
