New York Times

Atavar sculptures a luminous, abstract landscape with its own gentle rhythms…Mr. Atavar's work induces a reverie. His .sciis (pronounced skies) is a dreamlike series of 3-D landscapes that demand a leisurely viewing. The site is programmed to unfurl at a gradual pace, and no amount of hyperactive clicking will advance visitors faster through its six abstract settings. The first scene is a red road that runs through a blue sky. With deliberate steps, visitors can catch up to a pair of robots, the last realistic characters they will see. But it is quite easy to fall off the road, so its is more likely that they will immediately descend into the painterly tableaus that follow. Some portray natural phenomena like an animated snowfall, while others are amorphous, warm-toned shapes that can be circled or penetrated. Not quickly, though. Mr. Atavar, who resides in his native London, said he wanted to make a work that was as immersive as the monumental colorfield paintings that the Abstract Expressionist painter Barnett Newman made in the 1950's. 'It seemed to me that those works were very interactive,' Mr. Atavar said. 'I started to think of the colour in the browser window as having a depth I wanted to explore.' 'Mr. Atavar is a former performance artist, though, and his true subject is time. In the Web's early days it was called the Worldwide Wait because it took so long for pages to load. With high-speed connections and fast-changing technologies that term has been supplanted by talk of always-hurried 'Internet time'. In '.sciis' Mr. Atavar restores a meditative sensibility to the Net. 'A lot of my work forces people to wait,' he acknowledged. His goal was to find a way to get them, he said, 'to stay in front of the screen for a long time and just allow them to be there.' …perhaps a new era of Impressionism is upon us. Matthew Mirapaul Impressionists in Cyberspace, Digital but Diverse 6/8/01