By Dana Tyrrell

In his newest exhibition, Cole Pawlowski continues to push the limits of perception and digital intervention. A multidisciplinary artist based in Buffalo, Pawlowski’s practice spans a wide spectrum — digital art, painting, drawing, sculpture and photography — all of which find quiet convergence in his latest body of work, presented on aluminum panels.

The pieces on view are visually charged: geometric abstractions rendered with an almost obsessive attention to structure and spontaneity. Here, forms warp, loop and stack in unresolvable tension. A high-key palette meets rigid edges, but there’s always something tender breaking through — a trace of the artist’s hand in the digitally-rendered gestures and compositional minutiae. It’s in this collision that Pawlowski finds poetry: precision meets vulnerability.

Aluminum, as both surface and concept, plays a central role. Known for its industrial sheen, the material becomes a component in these works. The panels catch and hold light, causing the shapes to vibrate with every step of the viewer. This phenomenon isn’t incidental — it’s activated. Visitors are even encouraged to use 3-D glasses for select works, a gesture that heightens the oversaturated surfaces, knocking forms forward and back in a playful disorientation.

But this is more than an optical exercise. Pawlowski’s use of aluminum speaks to larger ideas — about labor, technology and the machine’s place in contemporary artmaking. He invites us to consider the disconnect (or perhaps the intimacy) between cold, manufactured materials and the warm, idiosyncratic imprint of human touch. There’s a tactile contradiction at work: rigid substrate meets kaleidoscopic movement; order emerges from noise.

These compositions nod toward De Stijl, Constructivism and even the gridded intimacy of quilting traditions. Yet they remain situated firmly in a digital now. Pawlowski is not mimicking these precedents — he’s filtering them, remixing them through the lens of contemporary digital tools and post-industrial aesthetics.

What emerges is a body of work that refuses to settle into comfort or familiarity. These are artworks that vibrate, that challenge the viewer’s position and perception, that complicate the binaristic hierarchies of human and machine, analog and digital, soft and hard.

Cole Pawlowski’s current exhibition is on view through April 30. For more information, visit www.allenstreetart.com.