Whereas meaning in art was once pronounced, codified, and doted upon by both artists and theoreticians alike, it is now increasingly marginalized. In the vacuum where meaning was once believed to have resided, all sorts of other possibilities have rushed in—the end of history, anti utopian critiques, and the objectification of meaninglessness are three of the theoretical agendas that are currently espoused most. The tide of fashion has turned, and abstract painters have gone from being revered figures to being highly suspect practitioners. If the possibility of meaning no longer exists, the abstract painter is faced with the likelihood that his or her work will amount to nothing more than so many decorative instances.
Jean Feinberg doesn’t approach the issue of meaning or meaninglessness head-on, which is not to say she avoids it. There is something else going on in her work. Her format—in which the painting’s height is nearly always twice its width—recalls a door or a figure standing still. Thus, the canvas becomes a plane with figurative associations, rather than a blank field. Her paintings are not self-reflexive critiques of Modernist codes, but are self-reflective investigations that have to do with how people can see themselves.
Feinberg’s vocabulary consists of circles, a stylized arabesque, and planes with rounded edges. In several paintings, a shape thrusts upward from the bottom edge. Ravens (all works, 1989) depicts a deep-blue house- or torso-shape pushing through long clusters of bluish-black strokes of paint. Another group of paintings is linked by Feinberg’s depiction of a snowmanlike shape. In Noman’s Logic, a black snowman shape leans against the right edge; the painting becomes both a container (an inhibiting constraint) and a support holding the figure erect. In One With Desire, the head of the figure is rendered in hot pink. Desire, it suggests, is in the mind, which is part of the body. The viewer imagines that the hot pink will spread through the black, like a blush. In both groups of paintings, Feinberg utilizes the polarities of figure/ground or inside/outside to evoke tension.
The artist seems caught between two modes of articulation, the expressionist and the formal, and does not want to give in to either one fully. Passive/Aggressive, for example, is divided horizontally into two equal-sized planes. The upper half is orange, while the lower half is black. In the upper-left-hand corner of the orange plane a circle has been covered over (only the faintest hint of it remains), and another circle is submerged in the upper-right-hand corner of the black plane. It is these pictorial traces that shift the painting out of its geometric straitjacket and into the psychological realm evoked by the title.
Feinberg seems to be trying to depict her subjective self objectively. It is a large ambition which few contemporary abstract painters have been able to accomplish successfully The artist ’s snowman isn’t, as the word suggests, gender specific. The more we look at it, the less playful it seems. Rage has imploded, and an impenetrable black figure leans against the edge of its prison, which is the painting. Constraint has been transformed into an imaginative possibility fixed in paint. The inevitability of dissolution has been stalled, so that the viewer sees what lies ahead. The present is extended into the future; time, rather than timelessness, is reclaimed. In Feinberg’s work, dread and wonder overlap.
—John Yau
