Richard Van Buren and Glenn
Goldberg
Sideshow Gallery
319 Bedford Avenue
Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY 11211
21 February - 15 March, 2004
By RACHEL
YOUENS
Glen Goldberg
Wish (wall) 2004
ink and watercolor on wall, expanding size
Courtesy Sideshow Gallery
The painter Glenn Goldberg and sculptor Richard Van Buren are both nature
poets who work in a decorative vein. The installation of their work
at Sideshow dovetails so well that their many distinguishing qualities
compliment one another. Van Buren's vocabulary of open and organic forms
challenge modular thinking and float with weighted gracefulness. Goldberg's
paintings of fantastic flowers stand against gently grayed backdrops
with attending birds, giving the impression of childlike ingenuousness.
While Van Buren's wall sculptures delight through sonorous tones, Goldberg's
paintings invoke the sensation of ironic innocence.
Each of Goldberg's brightly
colored flowers, with their compartmentalized and kaleidoscopic geometry
of petals, is titled Wish. Perhaps this decision underlines the artist's
challenge to a Romantic attitude in painting, or maybe it is his recognition
that while 'desire' is magical, it is also habitual and consistent,
since a wish is often stated in childlike terms that render it unobtainable.
All of his flowers are in turn decorated with tiny black dots, a repetitive
action we often viewed as obsessive. But Goldberg challenges this expectation
with his decided lack of investment in these marks, so that they become
disarmingly faux. Because the paintings so determinately sidestep our
assumptions about our emotional core, Goldberg's seeming naïveté
is both mesmerizing and disarming. The colors of the flowers are saturated
with patterns of alternating dark cadmium reds, cinnabar greens, and
mustard yellows, they are wafer-thin, and their paradisiacal settings
feel atmospherically moist. All of these aspects add up to an experience
that could be the visual equivalent to what the fin-de-siècle
poet Mallarmé termed the crisis of 'ticklishness'.
Richard Van Buren
Talking to Glenn 2003
Thermo-plastic
Richard Van Buren's sculptures
appear to have the tensile strength of cut steel, but they are made
with thermoplastic, a material which gives the artist greater flexibility.
They project from the wall in still action, suspended forms that encircle
space with a great deal of variety and elicit the possibility for several
viewpoints. Painted, their color is elegantly balanced between deep
metallic earth tones, dusky blues, and transparent lemon yellows. A
series of several "Kowloon Redheads" stretches across a wall
in bronze, rust reds, and lavenders. Each one expands, curves, and contracts
within a contained perimeter. At intersections, burgeoning egg like
forms emerge. Eagle and Clams, which projects from the wall with great
depth, seems to be distantly informed by an aerobic structure like a
Wright brothers flying machine. Yet its implicit naturalism is easily
balanced by its decorative structures. Van Buren is more interested
in the meditative experiences of interplay between form, space, and
movement, as the elliptical open-grille work of his sculpture suggests
the containment of energetic forces.
These "male" artists'
works refer to the seventies, with its anti-authoritarian attitudes
that brought values unexplored by modernism to the forefront. From Feminism
to pattern painting, their paintings seem linked to movements that experimented
with aesthetic and political values. While Van Buren's work evokes rhythms
of melodic alliteration between the sculptural and painted object, Goldberg
creates statements that bespeak of our hyper self-consciousness.
It is said that Helen Keller
could distinguish between red roses from white roses by the thickness
of their petals. The difference in thickness in Goldberg's and Van Buren's
work is a decisive factor in the way their works effectively operate
and generate emotional qualities.
Rachel Youens is a painter,
writer, and teacher who lives in Brooklyn
