Maya Gold’s Paintings
Leah Abir
One of Maya Gold’s paintings (Make a Wish, 2005) features variously sized round orange stains strewn across a blue background. The moment in which one of these blots is revealed as an orange, is also the dizzying moment when the picture unfurls before the viewer and the painting’s flatness transforms into radical illusory depth. A bunch of oranges fall into the hands of a small human figure, which now appears to be located far below. The viewer, equipped with yet another perspective, can identify various scenes in the paintings depicted from a bird’s-eye view, from a distant overview: a figure raking leaves into piles, a group of open umbrellas against a grayish backdrop, small figures carrying bent arrows on their backs. Gold persists with this perspective, even when the scenes involve large crowds or when they are entirely devoid of human presence.
This view from above has various precedents in the history of the image – from modes of topographical mapping to modernist landscape paintings. Most of all, however, it is identified with photography – the technical invention which has, ever since its inception, flattened all the coordinates of the point of view into a single two-dimensional surface: the observer, the view, and the spectator. 1 Bringing both the figurative and the formal to the surface, as in Gold’s paintings, also characterized the decisive moment in the early 20th century, when formalist photography – by means of the same perspective – extracted abstract formal arrays from concrete cityscapes. The view from above (from the city’s growing buildings) enabled photographers to draw back and break away from the street, and generate general, orderly representations, unified
landscapes of the metropolis bustling below, by conveying a simultaneous sense of superiority and individuality, liberation and belonging. 2
The figures in Gold’s series “Restreet” (2006) similarly operate in the urban sphere. Like many figures in her other paintings, they engage in (re-) ordering, carrying a form and arranging it. Whether they depict leaves, hats, or white road lines, the paintings describe processes of accumulation, gathering and scattering, which seem to parallel-substitute between the illusory image and the actual painterly act. The female figure in While (2005) cat. 14-16 cat. 31-35 rakes the leaves with the same industriousness in which they are drawn. This is also the significant moment when the energetic-diligent figure unites with the figure of the artist and the figure of the viewer, who gather stain to stain to acquire form and image.
Gold’s paintings call for a complex, ambivalent viewing. On the one hand, the painting is all view, vision, euphoria of an open eye; on the other hand, these paintings are strewn with a myriad of painterly distractions, which disrupt the eye’s leisurely wandering amidst the details, as well as the order promised by the overview and the painting’s meticulous arrangement. The confident walk along the roads and paved sidewalks is brutally interrupted by constant shifts in scale occurring when the arrangement of the flat painterly sphere is charged with all the tools of its illusory potential to generate an imaginary realm. These fluctuations occur with great rapidity, with the swing of a cinematic camera. The return from the open space to the form, to the color stain, is just as easy and immediate: by altering the angle of a cast shadow, by failing to settle between the shadows of the traffic lights and the power lines (these shadows are cast from a great distance, yet they are also present as flat blots).
The figures in Gold’s paintings appear busy, often with a serial act which tempts one to follow it through several paintings in a sequence, but the narrative is denied, absent. The colors likewise behave as though they
belong in a symbolic order of seasons or times of day, but in effect they are underlain by an independent, painterly set of rules.
In some of the paintings dark brushstrokes become shadows without a clear source, veiling the watchful eye and forcing a blurred, occasionally stained vision. Like the aforementioned transformations, these, too, interrupt the reflection which order has fleetingly introduced. The direct visual effect seems incongruent with the realm of thought.
These painterly tactics not only expose the construction mode of the image and the illusion, but they also infuse the viewer with doubts regarding the privileged point of view he has been granted, for the space does not yield to him: the vulnerability and sensitivity of the high vantage point is exposed in the loss of balance. Vis-à-vis these oscillations, is it possible that the control of the space is, in fact, in the hands of the little, solid, ordering figure? Of its many organizers, who is the author of this painterly sphere?
Maya Gold’s painting knows that it is constructed by the viewer, but it also knows that it is capable of misleading him. Her works require the viewer’s eye and the structuring inherent in it, as a translator and implementer of the painterly intentions. At the same time, order prevails in the works alongside its violation, and the gaze’s transcendence alongside its failure. The viewer’s control over the painterly sphere before him is present in them time and again as an illusion. On the one hand, these paintings embed consistent disturbances that generate constant withdrawal of image to form and back; on the other hand, it is precisely these disturbances that enable the beholder to feel the time and space.3 Vis-à-vis Gold’s works, an inventory of painterly possibilities serves the viewer as a foothold when the ground is removed from his gaze.
