Art has been in existence for 35,000 years. Every single human culture has produced a distinctive art. All these styles, spanning many millennia, shared in common that the average member of the culture could understand the art—until this century. In an unsettling development, 20th century art disconnected from the public to go its own way.

Modern society has charged physics, King of the sciences, to describe reality. Physicists wear the mantle passed along by earlier shamans, priests, philosophers, theologians, and early scientists who also engaged in this endeavor. In the past, a reasonable sophisticated member of the culture could understand the explanations proffered by this select group—until this century. Then, the new physics began to traffic in counterintuitive scientific facts and theories that have left the public bewildered and feeling abandoned. Stardeath, black holes, quantum jumping, and the space-time continuum so defy common sense understanding that most non-specialists have given up trying. Physicists have shrugged in resignation, claiming that their discoveries have outstripped the versatility of the lexicon. Physicist Werner Heiseberg wrote, "The real problem behind these many controversies was the fact that no language existed in which one could speak consistently about the new physics. The ordinary language was based upon the old concepts of space and time." In a concentered and fantastic coincidence, art became inscrutable at the precise moment that physics became impenetrable.

The poet Ezra Pound observed, "The artist is the antennae of the race." In some mysterious way, visionary artists are providing a much needed symbolic language to express the concepts behind the tongue-tied equation-speak of the new physics.

Antonio Arellanes is one such visionary engaged in creating works that help us, the viewers, grasp the newer concepts concerning space, time, and light. His iconography presents archetypical images juxtaposed in such a fashion that at some unconscious level we are challenged to question our assumptions concerning these three basic constructions of reality. John Russell, the art critic, observed, "There is in art a clairvoyance for which we have not yet found a name, and still less an explanation."

Antonio studied at the Chicago Art Institute and began his artistic career investigating the nature of light. Working first primarily with black brush strokes, he created a series of dark paintings into which he gradually introduced color. Color of course, is nothing more than light of variable wavelengths. As he moved from a primordial darkness that evoked the chthonic realm of nature, he added to his works the radiant energy of color resonating at different frequencies within the electromagnetic spectrum. The contrasts between his heavy use of black and startling introduction of vibrant colors remind one of the two tines of a tuning fork that eventually begin to harmonize their frequencies. Opposite yet complimentary, the absence of all color, black, interacts with the colors of the spectrum in a way that conflates two aspects of a duality demonstrating that at a higher level of abstraction, they exist as a unity.

So, too, in his iconographic references to space and time, Antonio inserts symbols into his complex compositions that are windows into other levels of consciousness. Strongly influenced by the mystic philosopher Krishnamurti and physicist David Bohm, the artist employs symbols representative of their insights that also describe the abstract coordinates of time and space. He also imbues these symbols with mythic language that connects them to the Collective Unconscious; that reservoir of half-seen half-apprehended symbols that portray the imago mundi, the image of the world as seen through the filters of our limited perceptual apparatus. Arellanes affords us the opportunity to glimpse fragments of a whole that is tantalizingly just beyond our human ken and confirms the art critic Wyndham Lewis's dictum, "The artist is engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person aware of the present."

There is in the artist's work an intricacy that suggests both the cog and gear workings of purely mechanical devices reminiscent of Ferdinand Leger's style and complex patterns burned into silicon chips that convert them into microprocessors. These same patterns bear an uncanny resemblance to the geometric patterns of prehistoric petroglyphs. It is as if the artist is allowing us to see the workings behind reality by piercing through the scrim that obscures it, providing us with the sometime entertaining, sometimes horrifying technicolor lantern show of everyday appearances. And always there are these dazzling chromatic swathes of color like the crack in the cosmos through which light originally poured. As John Russel the art critic observed, "Color is energy made visible."

By mixing images from ancient Native traditions with those that evoke machinery, the artist compresses both the time and space of the human condition and presents in one canvas ideals that undergird both the modern and the archaic. High tech bar-graphs are interspersed in the same works as images of the sun and the moon. Arellanes uses aluminum strips, mylar, oil and acrylic to make visible to the viewer the abstract concept that we are the first society to live in the past, present, and future.

The wheel is a recurrent icon present in Antonio's work; as both the symbol of unity and recursiveness it allows us to contemplate the implications of the fourth dimension of space-time and unity that underlies the sumptuous variegated response to the works. Antonio Arellanes's work makes visible T.S. Eliot's observation, "Great art can communicate before it is understood."