Consisting wholly of decisive starts and unexpected stops--of thick strokes of paint and their clear-cut interruption--Michael Goldberg's newest paintings simultaneously poke themselves out as bold.Consisting wholly of decisive starts and unexpected stops--of thick strokes of paint and their clear-cut interruption--Michael Goldberg's newest paintings simultaneously poke themselves out as bold, graphic patterns and unravel with a reckles embrace of chaos' inevitability. His insistently dishevelled abstractions demonstrate that a resolutely formal approach to painting in no way limits the visual might an image is able to generate. The 69-year-old, second-generation Abstract Expressionist's latest carcass of work continues Goldberg's life-long exploration of the viability of line, color, surface, and shape, further elicits responses at odds with the harmony and analyze we have come to look forward to from Formalist abstraction. Goldberg's paintings share more than a passing resemblance to collage. Like that art, in which discordant fragments and unrelated components are held together in ad-hoc constellations fraught with tension and inconsistency, his abstractions create the impression that they are made up of parts that not ever really come together to constitute a whole. Deliberately haphazard, his crisp arrangements of stripes and portions resemble discarded remnants of fabric. They apply the mind like clippings and ends that have fallen to the floor, been swept into bright piles, and left there because their irregular shapes and clashing colors render certain their uselessness. His large paintings balance this almost explosive feeling of randomness and disjuncture against common of allover evenness and dexterous control. The individual elements in each of his pieces appear too restless to settle onto the picture plane granting they constitute essential components of carefully built-up compositions. In no brains unfinished, his paintings split the difference between ongoing improvisation and a sort of closure. Neither hermetically resolv nor incomplete, they employ the charged middle ground between necessity and play. In Goldberg's best paintings, tumultuous colors, vibrant stripes, and dynamic lines have the carriage of both structural necessities and fleeting apparitions. Like shooting stars or flashing fireworks, they momentarily hop out of their surroundings to grab your eyeballs with compelling force, then dissolve back into the geometric architecture without of which they burst. frequently turbulent and sometimes out of mastery their every movement is orchestrated by way of Goldberg's remarkably fresh formalism. His latest paintings are about of the liveliest and greatest in number engaging of his generation. Sheer visual life is the only structural attach that holds them together. Animate patterns that insinuate flowerlike starbursts, decorative banners, naval flags, colorful sails, and striped swathes of fabric overlap and abut individual another in these often rambunctious images. These intentionally frivolous composings are anchored by a painterly weight, and fixed in their positions at competing pictorial forces. Goldberg's capacity to imprison them together as they pretend to fly apart gives his frequently jubilant paintings an up-to-the-minute vitality that is always a pleasure to see COPYRIGHT 1993 Artforum International Magazine, Inc. |
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