Inverse Squares (Yellow on Blue), 1991

The Estate of Jaan Põldaas

“In Newtonian physics, the Law of Inverse Squares applies to electromagnetic radiation and gravity, and defines the intensity of forces acting at a distance as being inversely proportional to the square of the distance. If a light shining on a wall has a certain intensity at a given distance, then that intensity is divided by four when the distance is doubled. Newton discovered this principle in the seventeenth century and used it (along with his nascent calculus) to plot the paths of the planets. The principle itself is implicit in the laws of perspective, which were formulated about a century earlier by painters in Italy and Holland. When it had become obvious, by the early 1990s, that perspective drawing was being taken over by machines, I involved myself nostalgically by making several series of paintings that used a sequential square root variation of width to produce equal areas of different size and shape. In each half of an Inverse Squares painting, there are four colours of equal area. These may be seen as a series of (deliberately approximate) squares, arranged one on-or-in another, with the respective relative side dimensions of 20, 1.732, 1.414, and 10. These numbers are the square roots of 4, 3, 2, and 1. Each painting has red, yellow, blue and black areas on both sides. The in-to-out sequence is ABCD on one side and ABDC on the other. Each nominal colour is represented by two different pigments. The resulting composition has a figure-ground relation of each inner square to its two partial surrounds and a more basically graphic character in the central stripes. (In my opinion.)” - Jaan Poldaas, 2014 (Artist’s notes, from the Jaan Poldaas Archive)