Unmoored/ Marilyn Gold’s recent Paintings

Paintings have a genealogy. The most radical pictorial developments stemmed from predecessors. The most iconoclastic of artistic acts reacted and related to the images they shattered.

Marilyn Gold’s recent paintings converse with a vast pictorial family. Influences and relations abound, and like a large family, a broad selection of interactions and intersections are evident. From the most subtle to the deeply profound, she is immersed in, while concurrently conducting, a rich and fertile discourse with a host of past and present painters.

There is no anxiety of influence in these paintings. Nor are there superficial quotations, stylistic or other. While not shying away from rich associative connections, as a painter and as an artist, she operates on her own terms. 

She does not seek a “ signature style” for it’s own sake. Her style, or rather her pictorial language, is achieved through a host of painterly acts and movements. Through a distinct, sincere, and personal process, she achieves and establishes a clear and individual voice.

Operating in a pictorial syntax that is broadly associated, or simplistically identified with the Abstract Expressionist genre in its myriad formations and permutations, she has developed a particular vernacular wherein conflicting and opposing formations not only co-exist, but also form a distinct painterly presence.

Hue and tone, edge and diffusion, line and area, surface and depth, Gold manages to imbue her paintings with a vast vocabulary of mark making that straddles seemingly oppositional and complex dispositions that cohere into a rich, suggestive, and particular pictorial language.

And perhaps unbeknownst to her, she activates and engages the viewer in ways   distinct and profound.

Differently than paintings where mark making is an explicit subject of the work, in Gold’s painting, mark making transforms the viewer into a spectator. 

One experiences the forming marks as they seemingly happen. These are not static paintings. A sense of unfolding, a metaphoric movement is implicit in her formations. Her mark making is process in action, while having already taken its supposed static place amongst all other painterly activity on the surface and in the field.

Yet this mark making does not superficially represent itself as such, but rather, is organic and harmonious within the pictorial action. Improvisatory and fixed notations share an exactitude that does not sacrifice the atmospheric nature nor the fluid character of these paintings

Even that most fixed and regular of pictorial principles -the paintings edges- seem fluid and transitory. The pictorial plane as momentarily demarcated by the canvas edge, is fluctuating and in movement. At times defining our field of vision within which action is happening, and at times unmoored, capturing various activities in its flow.

This seemingly unfixed and unanchored disposition echoes and operates in concert with the very forms within it, that seem to be floating in indefinable directions, in passing, momentarily engaged with one another. 

This work is imbued with that most fleeting of achievements. Managing to be evocative while evading incoherence, it suspends real time and engages us in its own world.

Free of novelty and absent irony or sarcasm it unequivocally embraces beauty and places it on a fragile shimmering foundation.

Eyal Danieli  2016