The Carr Gallery located in the Willard Arts Center will feature the constructed/conceptual paintings of New York-based artist Martin Weinstein beginning Jan. 15 and running through March 6.
In the work to be exhibited, Weinstein has focused on painting “portraits” of his wife of many years engaged in gardening, hiking, or simply living in their upstate New York home. These paintings are both portraits and landscapes, in the tradition of “figure in a landscape.” Weinstein captures the figure and face of his wife in the present, but overlays this common sense perception with a number of semi-transparent echoes of her figure, each of which serves as a lens (much as one might look at something through a tinted bottle) to reframe the reality around her. Together, the profiles or silhouettes of the figure combine to provide an overall sense of the fullness of the reality of a person as a being with a past, present and future living fulfilled in a prismatic present.
One of the signal characteristics of Weinstein’s work is its perceptual lightness. Weinstein constructs his paintings using a series of sheets of Plexiglas overlaid on one another. Weinstein works out all of the compositional and technical issues of layering on Photoshop (the computer?) before going to paint in front of the subject. The Plexiglas is layered to allow foreground to float over background, and colors to drift from pastel to intense in a manner that parallels the interplay of times and seasons in the work. By removing his painting from the physical constraints and tactile impulses of “oil on canvas,” Weinstein has found a way to match the physical substrate of his work with the visual construct of reality as conveyed in the work.
A special quality of these works involves the variation in painterliness which both Plexiglas and the compositional arrangement of more or less present--opaque or transparent, silhouette or ghostly--figures allow. In several scenes, one looks through a silhouette of the figure, perhaps representing a future self, and sees brighter tones, different times of day or year. Weinstein is also released from the present scene to explore how memory or anticipation as held in the mind may enhance reality: so one sees his wife inside other renderings of herself when younger, or even older. In the same way that love is said in song to enhance one’s very perception of reality, Weinstein’s search to grasp the whole reality of a loved one enriches the world around her.
Weinstein remarks that the evolution of his work from straightforward landscape to more philosophical excursions into the complexities of space and time as manifest in present scenery or company was influenced by his reading of physics. According to advanced physics, our everyday sense of presence, as we live in and are consumed by the concerns of the moment, is limited by our inability to experience the universe in its true multi-dimensionality. Cognitive psychology also argues that reality in fact is constructed by us as our brains enact our memories and worries to fashion everyday life In this body of work, Weinstein has attempted to capture the phenomenological fragility of the moment and develop it into a new strength.
Weinstein’s work also reflects upon the nature of the self in a manner consistent with sociologists exploring what they term the “fractal” self, that is, the idea that a self is simply a series of instantiations of all one’s past selves, and in a genealogical sense that one is but the instant’s manifestation of all one’s ancestors, known or not. This sense of self as dispersed through the world of things and others is said to go back to Epicurus, and in art has been expressed by Janus-figures, by medieval carvings that open up in the manner of Russian dolls, and by much ethnographic art from Africa and Polynesia where figures subdivide into other figures. Weinstein’s approach to self positions itself in opposition to the ethos of the ego, an entity opposed to or separate from society, that still dominates Western thought. In some of his paintings, variations of depictions of his wife are meant, the artist remarks, to acknowledge that “she sees herself differently than I see her,” and always will. But Weinstein’s allocentric as opposed to egocentric paintings also insist that we also partly exist in others, and that others as perceived by us are also part of us, in effect making the paintings self-portraits as well.
In his use of transparent silhouettes, Weinstein’s paintings may relate to surrealism, as Magritte, Cornell and even Archimboldo utilized variations of the device to explore time-and-space shifts in reality. In his exploration of how a veil of extra-personal presence may bring painting into expressive or impressionist moments, Weinstein’s painterliness also relates to pointillism and impressionism. Overall, Weinstein’s art seeks to present an enriched reality and not a reality vitiated by jejune escapism into other, dream or fantastical realms.
The Carr Gallery is located at 450 A street in historic downtown Idaho Falls. Gallery hours are Monday-Friday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Saturdays 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and nights of shows. There will be an opening reception on Friday, January 15 at 7 p.m., prior to the iO! Theater- The Improvised Shakespeare Company performance in the Colonial Theater.
Sponsored by Jan Litteneker and the late Paul Litteneker and Total Practice Management/Doug & Louis Akers. Exhibition organized through Katharine T Carter & Associates
