BY ROXANA MARCOCI

Georgia Amar's recent production of Glass Panels is an analysis on the interplay between light, color, and space. The artist's interests in glass' transparency, reflectiveness, loss of gravity and the color spectrum, are related to the aesthetics of stained glass window. Investigating the way in which the eye defines chromatic tonalities, Amar came to mediate on the quality of light as a source of illumination, and a medium through which perception occurs. The Glass Panels have an inner coherence and serial logic that bespeaks the possibilities of architecture. Minimal in their conception, they stand at the opposite end of Bruno Taut's Glass House , 1914. At the beginning of the century, Taut and Paul Scheerbart, the "poet of architecture", made anew the mystical tradition of glass symbolism in order to transform old habits of looking, feeling, and experiencing space. Amar's structures bridge the Utopian aims of Taut to the cooler phenomenological constructions of a contemporary like Jean Dibbets. The Glass Panels survey definite systems of mensuration, proportion, and geometry that align Amar's art with the visionary designs of religious feeling. The illusions to the door, the threshold, and the window indicate techniques of orientation, which, properly speaking, are techniques for delineating the passage of one space to another - the syntax of the sacred place.

Roxana Marcoci is an art historian for SunStorm Art Magizine in New York.