"All of his avant-garde artists are indeed what Goethe called "beautiful souls," sufficiently conflicted unconsciously to try to consciously create a strange new healing beauty. Chimes's portraits have caught the gist of this ironical beauty, and also the tension in which it originates. Jarry himself said that a genuine work of art, while conveying "the diversity of attributable meanings," avoids "obscurity, easy chaos." It has the "condensed simplicity [of] the diamond [made from] coal." This is a truly alchemical, gnostic idea of art: the transformation of black coal into luminous diamond nder great emotional pressure. Chimes's Old Master portraits are such diamonds, and like diamond they cut to the core of the seemingly material problem they address: how to make true, meaningful, exceptional art. The mystical white paintings show that Chimes knows how to do so on his own. He has become an autonomous Pataphysician– an authentic Hermes of the spirit as well as matter– a refiner of the dark fires of the unconscious into pure spiritual light. The transformations of the dark, brooding portraits into the abstract white paintings– the timely past into the timeless is a major feat of self-understanding as well as transcendence."
-Donald Kuspit, excerpt from Paataphysician Redivivus, Locks Art Publications, 2001
