Recently in Bermuda Dan Dempster exhibited a series of twenty medium-sized paintings in "Ithuriel."

These works utilized the Minimalist icon of the equilateral square and explored a favourite theme of both Kierkegaard and the Late Modernists, the principle of variances exposed by repetition. The squares were created by utilizing industrial grades of graphite tinted - somehow and mysteriously - with ground chalk. In spite of the surface references to formalist philosophy and thinking, these works had their origins in some of Dempster's earlier forays into nature and art; earlier works which meticulously, almost photo-realistically describe the quality of light refracted through moving water.

These early works have many of the qualities of the rock photographic studies described earlier in that there is a rigid if alluvial composition which translates as both graphic surface and illusionary space. That is, one is aware of the medium of drawing but also aware of the impression of a real place - a cove or rocky inlet. The stony photographs have a liquid and subtractive space, watery yet solid, while the coloured drawings of light dancing through moving water have a solidity of surface which can be also diaphanous, a strict fractal pattern of ephemeral moments. To the paintings, Dempster has brought over this idea of a naturally formed medium, graphite. Graphite is a geologically created rock-like formation, and indeed we see it now translated to recapitulate the paradoxical effects of photons dancing through and bouncing off of water.