Under & Over the Surface -Between — Lisa Wohl

In her latest series of paintings, “between,” Lynne Golob Gelfman explores the boundaries and connections between two seemingly disparate environments, the urban landscape and the natural watery environment of the Florida coast. In doing so, she creates worlds of her own.  

Deploying an iconic element of urban life, the chain link fence, as her seminal imagery, Gelfman creates abstract paintings that evoke the interplay between the rigid structures that shape our cities and the world of water with its aura of mystery, its fluidity of motion and layered depths.  The paintings seem to hover at some spatial point between the real and the imagined, the defined and unformed. They invite the viewer to move beyond initial surface impressions to a more profound engagement with concepts of space.   

Gelfman has been exploring the imagery of fences and water formations for some time. The chain link fence with its clear metal patterns and use as a means to define and limit a space usually suggests urban arrangements of boundary and separation.  Yet, as the artist points out, the chain link pattern exists throughout nature and is seen, for example, in the refraction of light in the sea at low tide.  

In Gelfman’s paintings, the fence patterning is established only to fade and blur until the surface image starts to shimmer like waves.  The rigid metal-link lines seem to dissolve into the constantly changing patterns of water touched by wind or the shifting markings that the water’s ebb and flow imprints on sand.  Gelfman finds the urban in the ocean and the ocean in the urban, and structured pattern becomes oceanic in its potential.  

One touchstone for Gelfman’s inquiry into the nature of pattern and space has been the Japanese word, ma.  Ma suggests space as the experience of interval, rather than the usual Western conception of space as an enclosed three-dimensional entity.  By exploring this alternate understanding of what space is, Gelfman gives the viewer a space of the imagination. 

The paintings create an intentional confusion of perception.  Is the fence depicted in the painting a barrier? Is it intended to divide foreground and background?  Initial perceptions of line and pattern reverberate the closer one gets and the longer one looks until foreground and background seem to oscillate in a constantly changing and ambiguous relation to each other.  The viewer is neither here, nor there, but between, in the interval, ma.  

In  “between,” a grouping of five smallish, square paintings in yellow-green tones at first seems to depict chain link geometries.  But as the viewer comes closer and moves from painting to painting, this patterning begins to melt and the solidity and harsh edges of the urban environment fade ghost-like into the ever-shifting water world.  

Perception also changes as the viewer takes in paintings from different angles.  In two larger works, each 66 by 96 inches, chain link imagery painted in somber tones can look like waterfalls when the eye registers the work as vertical, or as waves rippling over sand when registered as horizontal.  

For all their evident beauty, these paintings challenge us. The chain link patterning so liberally present in cities around the world can call to mind the metaphoric chains that hold people in cages of their own making.  Yet, as the patterns blur and seem to move, there can be unease in ambiguity. The fence imagery can evoke satisfying structure, or, more darkly, confinement or exclusion. Water images can suggest expansiveness or suffocation.  Gelfman’s willingness to explore the full potential of her imagery gives her work its unique authority and conviction. 

The fence/ water imagery has also enabled Gelfman to free herself from the strict confines of abstraction.  “I’m allowing the context to happen,” she says.    In a two by two foot bluish-hued piece, an inner city landscape is almost perceptible behind the chain link imagery.  In some works, Gelfman uses spray paint, a reference to omnipresence of graffiti in the urban landscape. Yet this material that is normally used as a medium of clear delineation here creates a background that continually recedes and reappears as the viewer spends time with the paintings.

Gelfman’s artistic process defies traditional definitions of painting.  Missing are the obvious gestures—the trace of the paintbrush, the stroke.  Adrienne von Lates, director of education at the Bass Museum in Miami Beach, notes that in Gelfman’s pieces, “you see the marks,  but you don’t see the hand at work.”  Von Lates suggests that Gelfman’s process is akin to a sculptor working in paint. The result is paintings that are accessible yet enigmatic, beautiful yet dangerous, and always compelling. 

Gelfman’s work has been shown internationally and is in the permanent collections of the Miami Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., among others and in many corporate and private collections.

These latest pieces invite the viewer to enter them and, once inside, to revel in a world between dimensions—the world of ma. As human beings, we want to find order and form in chaos, but we also yearn for the unknown and inexplicable, the magic of illusion. We want solidity and change.  Gelfman’s profound exploration of imagery that conveys these complex, contradictory, and yet deeply connected impulses has given us the wonders of  “between.”