David Goldberg at Barefoot Studios

Review by Alec Clayton published in the Weekly Volcano, Nov. 24, 2005

'Carnival' acrylic on canvas
by David Goldberg 
'Karmic Totem' acrylic on canvas 
by David Goldberg

Maybe you saw David Goldberg’s show at Art on Center last spring. That was just a warm-up for his current show at Barefoot Studios. This show is much bigger, with larger and more vibrant paintings that are more solidly composed.

Goldberg’s paintings harken back to the days when modern art was new, when artists like Robert and Sonia Delauny enlivened painting with vibrant abstract forms, when Stuart Davis created the visual equivalent of jazz and Marsden Hartley painted emblematic pictures of German soldiers and Mark Toby’s all-over squiggles danced in an explosion of white.

Does this mark Goldberg as outdated and out of touch with contemporary forms? Perhaps. He certainly doesn’t seem to be enraptured by the clever imagery that marks much of today’s art, and there’s nothing shockingly avant-garde about his paintings. But he sure seems to know what painting has been all about since the advent of modern art a century ago.

There are 10 new paintings in his latest show, and three older ones. Goldberg paints geometric forms on a flat surface. Circles or discs predominate and are interspersed with triangles, squares, bars of alternating dark and light colors, and various squiggles of paint; and in at least one painting what looks like Chinese calligraphy. There are no obvious or direct references to anything outside the paintings, but it is easy to read industrial forms such as gears into some of the paintings and computer circuit boards into others; and the Chinese writing combined with checkerboard patterns in black and gold could refer to Asian palaces and silk gowns.

The surface forms are in bright colors that look more intense than they really are due to thoughtful juxtaposition of colors. The “backgrounds” of most of his paintings are mostly white and gray, and I put that word in quotation marks because his background shapes tend to advance to the surface plane and become positive rather than negative shapes. The color is laid on in careful strokes of mostly opaque paint of a paste-like consistency that, from one picture to the next, may be heavily built up or watered down ¾ but typically of the same consistency within any one painting.

The hallmark of his paintings is a multiplicity of forms within uniform fields created by repeating of similar shapes. By this means, Goldberg brings about variety within unity in individual paintings as well as from painting to painting. For instance, in some of his paintings all of the shapes are of similar sizes, but others have great variety of size; in some the paint is thick and crusty and in others it is thin and smooth; some are flat, with everything on the same plane, while others have implied depths. But you never see flatness and depth within the same paintings. In the paintings in which the paint is layed on thick, it is thick throughout, and the same goes for those that have watery paint. And, of course, you can't have a variety of sizes and sameness of sizes within the same painting, so Goldberg's consistency is carried out in this department, too . This complexity of variety within unity makes it fun to compare his paintings and look for recurring patterns from one to another.

Notice Goldberg’s use of space. Some paintings are kept flat by placing shapes side by side and having them intersect, and by keeping the values close; while others use overlapping shapes and strong light and dark contrasts, which creates illusions of depth. The difference is clear when you compare “Carnival” and “Karmic Totem.”

 “Carnival,” by the way, is different from all the rest. It is a profusion of small shapes clustered together and fading to emptiness along the edges. More highly energized than any of the other paintings, it is an explosion of circles and drips and squiggles in intense reds and pinks and yellows and blues. "Karmic Totem" is more typical of the other paintings in this show, as well as the Goldberg paintings seen earlier at Art on Center. It has that Cubist-Futurist industrial look, is spatially flatter and is more orderly. It will be interesting to see which direction Goldberg goes in the future.

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© 2005 by Alec Clayton