Jack Goldstein’s paintings don’t have much to do with the act of painting. They do, however, have quite a bit to do with composition and subject matter. Most of the canvases are combined in diptychs and triptychs that are deployed like story boards. The relationships established between the coupled canvases are graphically sophisticated and pictorially direct. Working with simple, visual declaratives similar to comic book panels, Goldstein never leaves room for any doubt about what’s going on. It is as if there was a big exclamation point tacked onto every painting.
A tiny, white missile launched in the middle of one large, rectangular black canvas is aimed directly at a compatibly scaled White House in the middle of the next canvas. A central panel filled with blotchy smog is bracketed by panels containing mirror images of belching smokestacks. The mirroring device is repeated in two canvases filled with diagonally positioned paratroopers dropping toward a landscape of trees casting stylized diagonal shadows. Except for the opposing inclination of the paratroopers, the paintings are identical. Oh, excuse me, there is another difference. One canvas is in shades of grey, the other in brown. The centerpiece of the show is a triptych in which the central canvas is dominated by a downward-angled jet with its exhaust streams fanning out like a peacock’s tail. Drifting above the jet is a paratrooper whose shoot hasn’t opened. On either side are red canvases that have been geometrically stroked with black. The only unmarried canvas depicts a camouflaged bomber flying far above a theatrically illuminated earth.
The concepts, visually and intellectually, are so one-dimensional that they beggar any attempts at interpretation. They are exactly what they appear to be: literal, attractive graphics. Gesture has been compacted into patterned response (acute accents and extended tildes). Style has been reduced to calculated design decisions. These are remarkably dispassionate paintings—so coolly, deliberately arranged that it is hard to understand what motivated their execution. They look like they were commissioned by an art director.
Aviation and pollution are pretty specific subjects. Yet, stripped of metaphor, they are as emotionally stingy as a badly observed piece of fruit. Victimized by a hip disengagement, the paintings emerge as punked-up decor.
—Richard Flood
