MARK DANIEL COHEN Kings: Donahue/Sosinski Art through Dec 19
Published in Review, December 1, 1998

There is a continuum between all extremes, a line of incremental shifts that binds together and blends all opposing purities. As much with art as with anything else. Abstraction and figuration are two ends of a single strand and, as with everything of the psyche, as with everything that comes of the action of our minds, an active dynamism ties between the two. The emphasis is in constant motion, the focus changes. The reliance on one mode soon becomes a dependence on the other.

Which is to say that a period of abstract work prepares the field for the return to the figurative, and a time of figurative art turns the soil for a feeling for the abstract. Each mode will follow the other, each is the inevitable subsequent of the other, for each serves its psychic purpose—each is a necessity, and history is our tumbling development. In the simplest form, this is to say—it is natural for forms to rise from the formless, for images to emerge out of the darkness. Ruminating for long enough, we will begin to dream.

And what we dream has a significance. Images possess a valency, a prescribed direction of meaning and capability for influence. In dreams and in imagination, in the life of an individual and in the life of a culture, images emerge with a reason. Which ones come matters, which is to say there will always be a component of the archetypal in them. They carry a weight of deep implication.

The emergence of the image of the king is a traditional and studied quantity. The king’s arrival in a variety of cultures represents the wisdom of the unconscious mind entering into consciousness. The king is the image of good judgment and self-willing, the capacity of the mind to know and direct itself. According to the psychologist C. G. Jung, the king is the symbol of the harmonious union of conscious and unconscious mind. It signifies the achievement of individuation—the goal of maturity, the fulfilled development of an independent and individual personality.