Sea-saw: On Maya Gold’s Recent Paintings
The themes informing Maya Gold’s work are refined in her recent cycle of works, “Maritime,” taking to the extreme all the qualities previously identified in her oeuvre. Generally speaking, Gold’s painting sets in motion the construction and deconstruction of an illusory space, distortions of scale, and multiple perspectives, introduced in a context which may also be deemed an aerial photography type of realism where it intersects with reflections about the connection between modernist abstraction in painting and the Romantic Tradition. In addition to the aforementioned affinities, the current group of works is also associated with the 17th century European tradition of marine painting, and may be read as a sequence of fragments extracted from marine painterly scenes. Unlike that tradition, however, Gold’s painting is neither a representation of military and technological power, nor the painting of quotations from the history of art. Gold—much like the manifestations of landscape and sky in the work of an artist such as Ed Ruscha, perhaps—sets out to abstract the space and expose its organizing principles: the space loses its concreteness in order to show what structures it on the optical (as well as cultural-social-economic) level. Without committing to Ruscha’s impact on Gold’s painting, the very mention of his work makes it possible to refer to hers within the context of the critique of utopian abstraction in painting voiced by American Pop, of which Ruscha was a forerunner.
Gold’s paintings, by their very essence, offer an unstable point of view: one moment during the eye’s hovering. First and foremost, they convey the sensation that they are always concerned with a movement of the gaze, an oscillating gaze of which each of the paintings is a type of freezing, a momentary halting thereof. In such a state of affairs, the paintings become akin to frames, frames in a near-cinematic sense, referring one to the sequence from which they were extracted, to what happens outside the frame, forward and back in time. The cinematic gaze is crucial to Gold’s work. The experience cumulating while wandering through her exhibition may be defined by means of concepts such as sequences, cuts, and crosses. If Gold’s familiar painterly touch heretofore scripted a bi-directional zoom in/zoom out movement of the gaze, in the current cycle of paintings it generates frames from a traveling shot; it is unclear, however, whether these frames reduce or expand the field of vision, what their orientation is, and whether they turn upward, downward, or sideways. Gold’s images occupy a dual state: they unfold a concurrent process of zooming in and out, enlargement and miniaturization, nullification and empowerment.
The unstable perspective in Gold’s paintings results in a discourse which goes beyond mere formalism, touching upon issues of identity and place. The viewer never knows from what vantage point a specific painting was executed, hence—from what perspective is the painting seen or from where exactly does he observe the painting. Consequently, the individual painting becomes an open arena of change, of constant transformation. In order to begin discussing the sensation elicited while viewing the paintings one may, with certain reservations, use the word “vertigo,” soft vertigo, albeit one which whirls the gaze: flagpoles transform into electric poles which transform into crosses; water becomes sky; a chimney’s smoke becomesclouds which transform into a reflection of themselves. The coordinates of the viewer’s field of vision and his balance may gradually be undermined; hence,the painting becomes a conductor as well as a testimony of the inability to form a coherent, orderly image of the world based on constant values.
Ory Dessau
