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Community Corner

Artist Brings 'Entropy' Series to Huntington's Alfred Van Loen Gallery

For artist Ed Cascone, chaos might as well be the medium, in addition to the motivation.

Cascone is the creator of a series of paintings titled “Entropy,” featuring an unusual, three-dimensional material between the paint and the canvas: expanding foam insulation. It’s a technique he calls dimensional surfacing, and he says, “It’s almost like sculpting and painting at the same time.”

“They portray a sense of disorder and chaos, and that’s basically the format for everything,” Cascone, 64, said in an interview.

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“Entropy,” a collection of more than 20 works, will be on display at Huntington’s Alfred Van Loen Gallery between May 3 and June 4.

Cascone has worked as a woodcarver, a street portrait artist, and in art restoration. But along the way, he has also worked as a contractor, working for a time with a company that installed air conditioning units on the roofs of buildings. It led him straight to his discovery that expanding foam insulation could have other applications, too.

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“I ran across this carpenter that was using it along the areas in a house where there were leaks from cracks in the wall. I didn’t know that I was going to actually use it for painting,” Cascone said. “One day I just picked up one of these cans and started playing with it. I started spraying it on a surface to see what it did, not actually touching it, but just seeing what would happen when it dried. It was kind of a discovery.”

Cascone  studied first at the School of Visual Arts in New York City – where one of his teachers was artist Chuck Close – and eventually earned his Bachelor’s degree in literature from Dowling in 2008.

In the study of thermodynamics, the word “entropy” refers to a measurement of disorder. Cascone said his interpretation of it also covers a spiritual interpretation of the concept.

“I don’t want to sound morbid – it’s just that the time we have on earth is very limited,” he said. “When you start to think about mortality, you start to think about beyond where you are in life. It’s kind of interpreting that mentality when you see these paintings. A great deal of it kind of interprets the sense of what the soul would be about and where your soul would eventually wind up.”

His series has been influenced by the work of Rudolf Arnheim, a German-born perceptual psychologist, author, and art and film critic who is known for works such as “Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye” (1954). Arnheim, who died in 2007 at the age of 102, once said that “the popular use of the notion of entropy” evolved over time. In his 1971 essay “Entropy and Art,” Arnheim wrote: “If during the last century it served to diagnose, explain, and deplore the degradation of culture, it now provides a positive rationale for ‘minimal’ art and the pleasures of chaos.”

Don’t associate “minimal,” however, with a lack of substance.

“When I start these paintings, I look at the surface and it’s empty. That is a very low state of entropy,” Cascone said. “When I apply the thought and start to develop it, that’s a higher degree of entropy. The energy is taking place to create the images. And this happens with every artist. I don’t know if they deal with it the way I do, but I try to put it into a simplistic terminology that interprets the thoughts and transposes it into a visual experience.”

The Alfred Van Loen Gallery is located at the South Huntington Library, 145 Pidgeon Hill Rd., Huntington Station. An artist's reception will be held on May 3 between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m.
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