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Glenn Goldberg at Charles Cowles - New York - drawing and painting exhibition
Art in America, Jan, 2003 by Cathy Lebowitz
The three large paintings and three smaller drawings (all 2002) that Glenn Goldberg recently exhibited offered a glimpse of the interesting turn his work has taken. For years, circle-based forms have appeared in Goldberg's canvases; often several small configurations would float at intervals on fields, as if engaged in a spatial dialogue. However, in these new works, intersecting circles expand into large mandalalike shapes that stand alone on neutral grounds.
Though it's hard to discern in the complexity of the final result, Goldberg starts with a relatively simple structure. He establishes a central circle and superimposes overlapping rings of circles of the same size. The resulting flowerlike shape is multiplied and subdivided in seemingly endless ways and painted in bold colors.
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An example of the intricacy of the patterning can be seen in the middle element of A-502. Nine small concentric circles are surrounded by a band of eight stripes of ocher, white and blue radiating from the form's center. These are further surrounded by a ring that is subdivided into yellow, red and green segments, each with a pattern of its own. Dots, in black or white, freckle each colored section, giving the whole image a glittering effect.
The water-based inks the artist used in the large paintings create a striking vibrancy. The luminous, translucent colors--cherry reds, vermilions, grassy greens, mustard and lemon yellows--play off one another and contrast with dark blue-blacks. The combinations of large areas and minute shapes capture the eye like a giant kaleidoscope. The three acrylic works on paper, although graphically similar, were lackluster by comparison.
The placement of the motif in the three paintings, all approximately the size and proportion of a full-length mirror, tends toward the upper right. Of these works, only one, titled A-302, contains imagery that stays within the bounds of the canvas. In A-802, the shapes irregularly run off the edges of the canvas on the top, left and right, as if they can barely be contained. This spillover does not seem predetermined, but rather it is as if the artist allowed chance its place in a method otherwise reliant on the precision of geometry.
Over the years, the elements of Goldberg's abstractions have often suggested different objects, from birds to videogame boards. With basically the same means, these paintings replace the referential with the contemplative. Like mandalas, they offer a focus for meditation, most likely for the artist as well as for the viewer.
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