THE VIEWER'S first impression of Farewell may be an endless sequence of nested boxes, or per haps of a tunnel receding forever into the distance. A figure stands in front of the meeting point of the receding squares, so that most of the squares are behind her head-at most seven squares are actually represented in paint. To understand this painting, one must understand how the artist has made the viewer see the sequence as infinite, and why.

Farewell was inspired by the death of Tooker's mother and the memory of a hospital corridor barred with light from open doors along its walls. The abstract image Tooker has produced from this memory touches on the infinite and uses both the mathematical and the symbolic and emotional aspects of infinity to communicate its message.

In her article "Infinity in God and Mathematics," Jill Le Blanc contrasts these two aspects of infinity. She suggests that the relation of the mathematical infinite to the infinity we attribute to God is that of metaphor. The mathematical infinite cannot describe or explain God's infiniteness, but it can symbolize it:

"What the concept of the infinite can express about God does not lie in the gradual mathematical demystifying of the concept, nor even in the residual strange bits of the mathematical infinite, but rather in the wonder (or dread) we have felt in being introduced to infinite series or set theory, or in looking at Escher's pictures, or at the sky at night."

This metaphorical role of the mathematical infinite illuminates the use of the infinite in Farewell. Tooker uses the visual image of an infinite sequence to create a mathematical metaphor with immediate emotional impact.

In Farewell, which is the most abstract of Tooker's paintings, the artist's technique serves to integrate the two aspects of infinity. The abstractness of the work contributes to its ability to communicate the concept of infinity; the beginning of a repeating pattern is apparent in the starkly explicit geometry of the nested squares, and the viewer extrapolates its continuation behind the figure's head as endless. This extrapolation, as it turns out, is mathematically justified.

The image, by George Tooker, is from the exhibition "Visual Proof- The Experience of Mathematics in Art," at Dartmouth College through December 12. The text, from the exhibition catalogue, is by Marcia Groszek, a professor of mathematics at Dartmouth.