Alan Chimacoff, Floor Show

Two guys walk into a bar…well, into a lobster joint on the boardwalk at the Jersey Shore. They are photographers on an early January photo outing. It is cold and raw outdoors and they are hungry…and surprised, but thankful, that there is even a restaurant open.

One of them is captivated by the floor—an irrational, crazy-quilt-non-pattern-patchwork of broken, multi-colored, cut, scored, rough and smooth mess of many iterations of bad concrete work, patched and repatched many times, probably over a half-century. It is wildly abstract, portions of it looking like Modern painting…, and pleading to be photographed. So he does, spending fifteen minutes shooting downward, framing picture after picture, avoiding his toes and distracting reflections from ceiling lights above.

This selection of the results are variations and transformations of several images, presented individually and in groups of two, three and five. The first of each group is a slightly intensified original; subsequent ones are reversed in color, solarized, and processed with an almost pointillist expression.

With purposeful ambiguity—all of them are purely abstract, intuitively driven, visual explorations that reveal fascinating complementary relationships of color and contradictions of apparent spatial depths. Some even imply a different composition.