CuboFuturism tells you that when you get too close to any object. your binocular vision ceases its normal functioning and the object fragments before you. The springtime of scientific inquiry that was the Renaissance brought incredible, lovely, harmonious flowers of encapsulated art, blooming in meadows of composting medieval religiosity. These plants wilted spectacularly over the next few centuries as the West began a thriving hothouse production of science and technology. The same spirit of inquiry that begat a Raphael Madonna via cubism's fragmentation became the bombs that blew up Nagasaki and Hiroshima 55 years ago, and concurrently exploded in New York as Ab-EX canvases.

Afragmented worldview is arguably a better net for capturing the authentic, even as it is unable to sustain cohesion. Its open structure when operating at optimum allows acknowledgment of a wider variety of experience: more tastes and flavors. Less judgement, more experimentation. Approached as an ideal, society could persist in this fractalization to the point that each individual subjectively would be confidently encased in her own bubble of " herenow spacetime," and we could possibly learn to evolve and dissolve rules and boundries more easily, more playfully, and with less hypocrisy.

Larry Bell's Fraction Series speaks implicitly to these possibilities and to the strength of hope materialized. As a standard part of his editing process. Bell was dumpster-readying large mixed-media canvases he'd deemed failures, by cutting them up into pieces (unconsciously mimicking, perhaps, the general rending of our social fabric by the perception of failure foisted upon those without money), when suddenly this destruction evolved new creative possibilities. While these particular larger works hadn't coalesced, there was an intensity of visual impact in the tiniest of them that could be recycled. His idea of a series in which each piece consists of a "fraction" of one of these larger wholes was born. Hope is the idea that the good, no matter how tiny. might continue. Seeing that this approach could generate an infinitude of activity, Bell decided to limit the quantity of works in the series. Ten thousand seemed like a good modest number. At last count, four years later. Bell has completed over 8,O0O.

Each piece consists of a mixed-media fraction of the whole collaged onto the center of a 10-inch-square piece of white paper. The viewing experience at New Directions allows intimate connection with a relatively small number of these pieces (30 or so) set in simple frames. Each presents an aura of beauty and compact visual intensity. Bell reflects the image of artist in his prime, mastering implausibly complex arrangements of color and