trued surface — Judith F. Rodenback
“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of
library.” — Jorge Luis Borges
A silky liveness of muted and elegant shimmer, undefinable layered and pearlescent, coruscating: these are the optical qualities that first strike the viewer of Lynne Golob Gelfman’s new paintings. Mature reflections on “grey” in all its permutations, from golden-eyed and amber to the pale bluish dove of India black reduced with white or the milkiness of winter clouds, from the hints of yolky streak in a thunderous sky to ripening peach seen obliquely. Arrayed in repeated yet slightly irregular lozenges across each painting’s field, such associative coloristic accents pull the eye, then slip away as light is mobilized by the carefully trued surfaces.
Thinking of silk, of fabric, in the expanded terms of utility and of fabrication, of textile and pattern, of warp and weft, of the positive and negative spacing of the weave lead a viewer to consider, in Gelfman’s oeuvre, the way in which painting (and abstraction more generally) is not about brushwork per se but about making, construction, the painter working the material like icing, paying minute and distributed attention to the granularities of the particular pigment and flux deployed. Here the liquidity of paint as medium ranges from viscidity to a limpid and vaguely daemonic transparency, while the surfaces— which have been troweled, scraped, soaked, poured, and sometimes sanded—develop an obdurate frescolike quality.
Abstraction in painting tends to generate serial projects as an artist explores a theme or a particular line of inquiry. Gelfman’s series, driven by motif combined with technique, have included between (begun in 2000), which she describes as “chain links,” structured by a pounced grid of hurricane fence and referencing the shuttling focus of a through-view to a further field, whether that glimpse of distance implies grassiness, grittiness, or ocean swell; computer-generated but painting-derived wallpaper prints (2003); the cipoll series (from 2006, named after some charming Italian onions called cipollini but also after the meshed grocery sack in which they so often come), which plays with cloudy, translucent skins; waves in the spindrift series(part of resist/react); the powerful burqa series (begun in 1999), which uses that garment as a prompt; a series called settings (1993), about the placement of table linens; forty-four white paintings devoted to the motifs of cloud/water/sand (begun in 2008); the resist/react series (2006), employing positive/negative processes associated with etching and batik; lines (2007–2008), exploring chemical drips in which a vertical zig-zag intervention interrupts the downward flow (Gelfman refers to these as the “voyage of the silent line”); and the new silky-metallic dune series (begun in 2010) of multilayered opticality, in which Gelfman’s familiar gridded lozenges dissolve into opalescent sheen. Gelfman’s abiding interest in pattern and the scaffolding provided by the repeat, whether the minimal yet lively variegation of hurricane fencing, dripped line, or repeated brushstroke, so much like a woven textural surface, gives clues to something more in the nature of painting itself. Textile analogies are not unfamiliar—indeed, Gelfman cites African and Latin American weaving practices as sources to which she has returned repeatedly, and the burqa series, begun in the shadow of North American engagement with Afghanistan (shortly after the Clinton administration’s Operation Infinite Reach sent cruise missiles into the mountains of that country), explicitly take sup those full-body veils in which the bodies of women effectively turn into drapery, caryatids devoured by cloth, and the oppressive gender politics of veiling, as both referent and nominal subject. Significantly, as the example of the burqa itself suggests, a textile has two sides or, as in the case of that garment, an exterior and an interior, a public face and a private face, a side for masculine view and a side reserved to, and reserving, the feminine gaze (indeed many textiles are “double-face”). Western painting traditionally makes use of a specific fabric set ranging from canvas to linen. While the face of the stretched canvas is signaled by the very fact that its physical support (stretcher bars) press it out from the surface on which it is suspended, the obverse provides tell-tale stains of the process to which its face was subjected— stains that, for Gelfman, speak equally to the various fluids and procedures to which her pigments are subject. In fact, between 2003 and 2013, Gelfman painted on wood or masonite when her process risked breaking through this textile surface; she has returned to canvas within the last year.
Gelfman’s tools are not just the brush and canvas, but include plaster scrapers, tiling trowels, sanding discs, spatulas, sponges, caustic chemicals, swabs; these are used to pounce, to spread, to scrape, to divert, to soak, to smooth. This is a verb list not usual to the discipline of painting; and if it has more to do with plastering or even fresco, the association is apt. Gelfman’s embrace of chance in the production of her work recalls the willingness of the fresco artist to allow nature to act in the binding of pigment to surface, while her process, which uses the ready support alternately laid out like a flatbed or propped against a wall, rotated and manipulated like so much plywood or dry goods, has a matter-of-factness that makes the visual end result all the more marvelous. That is, there is a natural give, a relationship drawn between the support, the materials adhered to it, and the laboring body that moves, pours, blocks, sands, rubs the resulting surfaces: Gelfman’s paintings are insistently made, built—yet with a witty, scintillating brilliance, a lightness that belies this facture.
Born at the front end of the post-World War II baby boom, educated at Sarah Lawrence College and at the School of the Arts, Columbia University, Gelfman is a world traveler with extensive ties to Latin America but she is also a long-time fixture in Miami. As an artist Gelfman is seated firmly within her generation of North American abstractionists yet brings to her work a very particular set of referents, many extending from her deep engagement with South America. Sources for Gelfman, whether these involve visual effects, questions of technique and surface, procedural encouragement or straightforward motifs, can be found in Chinese scholar rocks and in fragments of African and Latin American basketry or textile fragments the artist has collected over the past four decades; in the delicate yet forceful meditative repetitions of the painter Agnes Martin, with their reference in the experience of vision’s extent in the crisp expanses of New Mexican air, or in the free-flowing stain paintings of Morris Louis’ furling series; in the hallucinatory optics of British painter Bridget Riley, which themselves also have an interesting relation to textile patterns and repeats; in the architectonics of the Venezuelan Gego’s deceptively delicate wire structures or Brazilian Lygia Clark’s phenomenologically complex neo-concretist paintings and constructions, works that engage the eye as an organ of touch.
Martin, whose monastic powers of concentration yielded meticulous hand-rendered geometric works of optic and intimate delicacy, looms large as a model, while Gelfman’s work has been compared to the veilings and tonal reductions of Pat Steir, whose chromatic sensibility and technical play with viscosity she shares. Vija Celmins, another painter of rippling optical surfaces, and Gerhard Richter, who shares certain tools (the squeegee, a certain meditative deliberation, and aspects of the resulting smoothed surface), have sensibilities distinct from yet resonant with Gelfman’s. The deep dialogue with the work of other painters is evident not just in the reference points these predecessors provide. In Gelfman’s hands the motif of light as articulated through attention to surface sheen, the complex play with liquefaction, and the emphasis on what happens at the end of the squeegee’s run (as in the resist/react series, notably) yields a curiously near-photographic aspect that puts her work in surprisingly direct conversation with the fluid graphologies of David Reed, while the insistent play with symmetries, pattern and brilliant pigment, the resonance with textile pattern and the attention to the tactility of surface ally her work with certain projects of Philip Taaffe.
Gelfman’s works present fragments of patterns that by implication extend into infinite possibility; the frequent use of a square format enhances this sense of modular extendibility. Extensive, then, even centrifugal—hence, in one sense, motifs such as skin, fence, ocean, sand and, in another, the attention to weaving itself as metaphor (one thinks of Penelope, weaving and unweaving time in the story of her waiting for the wandering Ulysses). Finally, this surprising literary quality—a certain poetic density and iterability, the fascination with pattern, with what one might see as stanzas and scansion—yields yet another rich association. Gelfman’s paintings are, she notes, “an experience that you have to walk across,” delivering difference to the beholder’s every move. Indeed, even when shelved and nominally in storage, Gelfman’s paintings display their varicolored edges, thick with dribbled pigments that read like the spines of so many wondrous and magical books, so many texts waiting for discovery.
