Acevedo: My work uses photography but it is computer based, as the final images are created and developed in the digital realm. Moreover, it is its computer-generated component that in fact drives the work's primary purpose. My intention is to carry forth in the tradition of metaphorical and graphical spatial research as documented in the paradigmatic exploration of space-time, evident at the heart of the history of painting. Toward that end, my work, employs the use of all-space filling non-cubical polyhedrally arrayed networks to bridge and interpenetrate figure and ground. The images' characteristic "pseudo-molecular-model" space frame overlay, metaphors domains of electromagnetic and meta-dimensional resonance. The overlay is also a visualization, of a scene's substrate, turned up in the mix and made apparent, as it paradoxically oscillates between eternal emptiness and the fullness of an all-pervasive potentiality, this is sometimes called the void-matrix."

This graphic metaphor can be sourced to Acevedo's synthesis of concept from Fritjof Capra's book The Tao of Physics (1975) combined with aspects of R. Buckminster Fuller's Synergetics (1975-79). Highly relevant to the visual arts, is Fuller's geometry, based on triangulation and sphericity. It suggests a graphic language that is non-cubist and non-cubical. For example, Fuller's Synergetics promulgates mathematician Leonhard Euler's polyhedral topology of visual experience which consists of a phenomenology of line, crossings and windows (i.e. edges, vertices and faces) This most certainly updates the culminating 19th-century's Cezannic geometric tool-set of 'cylinder, sphere and cone' and it's resultant legacy - the 20th-century's primal traditional-media lexicon of graphical abstraction based on Cubism.

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Victor Acevedo is an artist, best known for his digital work involving printmaking and photography. He studied formally at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and he is now based in New York where he lectures on digital art at the School of Visual Arts. Inspired by a range of influences from M.C. Escher and Salvador Dali to R. Buckminster Fuller and Fritjof Capra, he produced a significant body of work in traditional media painting and drawing during the years 1977-1985. Acevedo made his last oil painting in 1984 and adopted computer graphics as his primary medium.

The main intent of Acevedo's work is to explore the structure of space by re-visioning pictures taken from everyday life. Towards this end, he builds various geometric space frames using 3D modeling software and then composites these purely synthetic structures into the pictorial space of digitized photographs.

The use of these particular geometrical matrices, i.e. networks of triangulated or semi-spherical polyhedra and the graphical tension achieved by juxtaposing them with photographic mappings of visual data is an opportunity to represent spatial field phenomena in a way that is non-cubical and non-cubist. More over, the use of digital imaging technologies, allows Acevedo the facile use of photographic realism with its native and various perspectival mappings to be put back into the abstract and metaphorical mix.

Acevedo has written, "There is no such thing as empty space. Empty space is filled with atoms and their dynamic interactions. Not only is space not empty, it has shape. In my pictures I conceptualize space as a field. I render figures and their environments and connect them pictorially - because they actually are connected in reality. At the same time the connective network that I use articulates the inherent structure of the so called empty space between the figure and ground."

For Acevedo, these geometrical structures are inspired from the notion of the void matrix. Some Eastern mystics describe this as the universal substrate of being - from which all life forms emerge and then ultimately return to. The void matrix metaphor is one of the key concepts discussed in Fritjof Capra's book The Tao of Physics. [1] This book explores the parallels between the description of sub-atomic particle phenomena by Western physicists, and descriptions of reality found in the major forms of Eastern mysticism. Acevedo's graphic visualization of the void matrix, is achieved by his adoption of various geometrical structures which are detailed in R. Buckminster Fuller's Synergetics [2] [3]. The primary polyhedral net or space-frame for this use is the isotropic vector matrix (IVM). This is an all-space filling network made up of alternating octahedra and tetrahedra.

In the traditional model of pictorial space we are taught that there is figure and ground and empty space between them. Cubism attempts to deal with the underlying structure of things by applying a system of planar abstraction to the figures or objects and the structural environment around them. By virtue of it being Modernist painting, the familiar real-world optical phenomenology codified in Renaissance perspective is lost. As is the late 19th century's technologically borne photographic realism. Picasso and Braque's use of collage exemplify another order of realism, however the collaged fragments ultimately play a role that conforms to the push-pull orthogonal principles of their painting. In Acevedo's work we are presented with a graphical metaphor that allows us to revisit this territory, anew.

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