Cheryl Goldsleger: Points of Order, Points of View
by Lilly Wei , 1999
Cheryl Goldsleger, in common with Uccello and other Renaissance masters, has always been enamored of that “bella cosa” perspective; more specifically, she has always been engrossed by the way shifts in perspective so radically alter our perception of relationships among objects, our perception of objects. Goldsleger is also fascinated by architecture, a fascination particularly evident in her drawings and paintings of the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. These works’ exquisitely rendered, tightly framed, labyrinthine plans suggest partial views of classical sites or anonymous urban complexes filled with structures that resemble amphitheaters, agoras, temples, offices. Not utopian visions, these invented, airless precincts, empty of life, function instead like memento mori, with intimations of transitions, absence, temporality and, ultimately, mortality. Their subtle spatial distortions (they are often presented in isometric perspective, from its overhead point of view), their architectural anomalies (arbitrarily placed upright slabs and columns, sunken shafts, abandoned chairs, rooms without windows, exits or entrances, ramps and stairways that lead nowhere), and their sense of isolation and silence, evoke, for example, Piranesi’s Carceri, de Chirico’s Mystery and Melancholy of a Street, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Kafka’s claustrophobic, premonitory surroundings, Borges’ surreal settings. Goldsleger’s sleight-of-hand is her ability to formulate images and spaces that are rational yet coexist and slide into the irrational, that pass geometric clarity yet dissolve into mannered complexity, into psychological forces.
By the mid-90’s Goldsleger began to compress her architectural renditions into mazes and labyrinths with their multiple associations and uses, ranging from the mythological and mystical to the diverting, to puzzles and games. This group of work was more diagrammatic, although the hard, brittle edge of geometry was tempered by material sensuality and by metaphor, quietly subverting their contained, measured semblance. Through the agency of impersonal geometry, Goldsleger arrives at the deeply idiosyncratic and urgent, an urgency that the eye reads, baffled and enticed as it follows the intricate, winding, angular lines of drawing, losing its way, finding it. In effect, all her work is a labyrinth, an involuted continuum of space-time, and vision is the golden thread that takes us to its heart, to its secret chamber, to the Minotaur – and back again. While Goldsleger describes her aesthetic formally, there adheres to all her work a sense of narrative; these precisely engraved squares, diamonds and triangles beg to be decoded and explained, like arcane symbols, arcane rituals, or the meaning of the mandalas or Minoan Linear B. Here, one secret may be, as other abstract artists have noted, that formalism at its core is mysterious, transgressive, a hybrid of reason and passion, not unlike the Minotaur.
Her latest mazes are even more concise although still linked to what came before. The architectural elements, submerged still more allow other aspects of her work – line, shape, tone, color, positive and negative interaction – to surface independently. From a distance, these works are self-effacing, modest in imagery and scale, their impact latent. The richness of the surface, the translucency of the wax and the subtle overlapping and interlocking of forms require a close view. The touched and burnished surfaces, the clean, crisp drawing, the drawing behind the drawing (which is often the same image rotated, seen from another point of view) slowly cast their spell. In order to extend the range of combinations and transitions, Goldsleger, at times, uses a multiple-panel format hung in grid formation; in Sequence (1998) for example, the repeating motif of the frontal maze is presented as negative images (neutral in color, in the background) in the top row, then repeated as positive images (black, in the foreground) in the bottom row, intersected by cut-off depictions of mazes seen obliquely.
Goldsleger has always been committed to craft and to the labor intensive. Her basic repertory consists of reticulated squares, circles, ovals, triangles, diamonds, versions of Cezanne’s cylinders, spheres and cones. There is almost always a space at the center of the painting or two spaces on either side of the center, as if the mazes had been pulled apart, their mid-points separated or in the process of being re-aligned. Centrum (1996) and Overview (1998) are examples of the former and Interchange (1997) and Combination (1998) of the latter. The support is either square or rectangular and is often partitioned internally into other squares or rectangles. These divisions overlay a grid of much smaller squares that is partly obscured. The surfaces are built up and scraped down, the colors limited to black and white pigments, the golden tint of the heated wax, the cool, almost imperceptible greenish cast of the linen. Making the surface more translucent these days, Goldsleger said she wanted to dematerialize the painting so that it was less solid, less established and more penetrable, which the greater transparency of the wax permitted. She continues to work with heated clear wax (which she began using some time ago as a way to get back into painting, as a way to merge painting and drawing, after five years of only making drawings). When melted, she pours the wax onto the linen and while still liquid, scrapes and presses it into the support. Sometimes she draws on the linen first, then adds the layer of wax which she scores.
Goldsleger complements, balances, adjusts: the representational into the abstract; the asceticism of line (mind) into the voluptuousness of wax (flesh); the minimal into the replete; drawing into painting; dark into light; negative into positive; the plain into the beautiful; restraint into release; the pragmatic into the magical; the classic into the anti-classic in order to reach a state of equilibrium, of completion: as in Newtonian physics, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. It is these balancings and oppositions that add scope to her patterns, to her visual gambits. The physicality of her work takes them out of the conceptual and into the sheer substantiality of pigment, oil, wax, and linen, all traditional materials, where form itself is meaningful. In the context of abstraction today, Cheryl Goldsleger cleaves to modernist aesthetics infused with more private introspections and interpolations. Hers is an ordered, elegant mania, a formalism that is rubbed, glowing, resonant and ambivalent, possessing a careful beauty that is more European in its sense of finish and fabrication than American, removed from the gestural imperative and immediacy of much signature American painting yet too fraught to be minimalist. Cheryl Goldsleger’s aesthetic proposes that order, measure, proportion – with a difference – once again be the standard and definition of art, of beauty.
Citation:
Wei, Lilly. “Cheryl Goldsleger: Points of Order, Points of View.” Cheryl Goldsleger. New York, NY: Fifth Floor Foundation, 1999. © 1999 Lilly Wei
By the mid-90’s Goldsleger began to compress her architectural renditions into mazes and labyrinths with their multiple associations and uses, ranging from the mythological and mystical to the diverting, to puzzles and games. This group of work was more diagrammatic, although the hard, brittle edge of geometry was tempered by material sensuality and by metaphor, quietly subverting their contained, measured semblance. Through the agency of impersonal geometry, Goldsleger arrives at the deeply idiosyncratic and urgent, an urgency that the eye reads, baffled and enticed as it follows the intricate, winding, angular lines of drawing, losing its way, finding it. In effect, all her work is a labyrinth, an involuted continuum of space-time, and vision is the golden thread that takes us to its heart, to its secret chamber, to the Minotaur – and back again. While Goldsleger describes her aesthetic formally, there adheres to all her work a sense of narrative; these precisely engraved squares, diamonds and triangles beg to be decoded and explained, like arcane symbols, arcane rituals, or the meaning of the mandalas or Minoan Linear B. Here, one secret may be, as other abstract artists have noted, that formalism at its core is mysterious, transgressive, a hybrid of reason and passion, not unlike the Minotaur.
Her latest mazes are even more concise although still linked to what came before. The architectural elements, submerged still more allow other aspects of her work – line, shape, tone, color, positive and negative interaction – to surface independently. From a distance, these works are self-effacing, modest in imagery and scale, their impact latent. The richness of the surface, the translucency of the wax and the subtle overlapping and interlocking of forms require a close view. The touched and burnished surfaces, the clean, crisp drawing, the drawing behind the drawing (which is often the same image rotated, seen from another point of view) slowly cast their spell. In order to extend the range of combinations and transitions, Goldsleger, at times, uses a multiple-panel format hung in grid formation; in Sequence (1998) for example, the repeating motif of the frontal maze is presented as negative images (neutral in color, in the background) in the top row, then repeated as positive images (black, in the foreground) in the bottom row, intersected by cut-off depictions of mazes seen obliquely.
Goldsleger has always been committed to craft and to the labor intensive. Her basic repertory consists of reticulated squares, circles, ovals, triangles, diamonds, versions of Cezanne’s cylinders, spheres and cones. There is almost always a space at the center of the painting or two spaces on either side of the center, as if the mazes had been pulled apart, their mid-points separated or in the process of being re-aligned. Centrum (1996) and Overview (1998) are examples of the former and Interchange (1997) and Combination (1998) of the latter. The support is either square or rectangular and is often partitioned internally into other squares or rectangles. These divisions overlay a grid of much smaller squares that is partly obscured. The surfaces are built up and scraped down, the colors limited to black and white pigments, the golden tint of the heated wax, the cool, almost imperceptible greenish cast of the linen. Making the surface more translucent these days, Goldsleger said she wanted to dematerialize the painting so that it was less solid, less established and more penetrable, which the greater transparency of the wax permitted. She continues to work with heated clear wax (which she began using some time ago as a way to get back into painting, as a way to merge painting and drawing, after five years of only making drawings). When melted, she pours the wax onto the linen and while still liquid, scrapes and presses it into the support. Sometimes she draws on the linen first, then adds the layer of wax which she scores.
Goldsleger complements, balances, adjusts: the representational into the abstract; the asceticism of line (mind) into the voluptuousness of wax (flesh); the minimal into the replete; drawing into painting; dark into light; negative into positive; the plain into the beautiful; restraint into release; the pragmatic into the magical; the classic into the anti-classic in order to reach a state of equilibrium, of completion: as in Newtonian physics, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. It is these balancings and oppositions that add scope to her patterns, to her visual gambits. The physicality of her work takes them out of the conceptual and into the sheer substantiality of pigment, oil, wax, and linen, all traditional materials, where form itself is meaningful. In the context of abstraction today, Cheryl Goldsleger cleaves to modernist aesthetics infused with more private introspections and interpolations. Hers is an ordered, elegant mania, a formalism that is rubbed, glowing, resonant and ambivalent, possessing a careful beauty that is more European in its sense of finish and fabrication than American, removed from the gestural imperative and immediacy of much signature American painting yet too fraught to be minimalist. Cheryl Goldsleger’s aesthetic proposes that order, measure, proportion – with a difference – once again be the standard and definition of art, of beauty.
Citation:
Wei, Lilly. “Cheryl Goldsleger: Points of Order, Points of View.” Cheryl Goldsleger. New York, NY: Fifth Floor Foundation, 1999. © 1999 Lilly Wei