Dot matrix: Marsha Goldberg's play of wood, pigment, and natural happenstance
Even sober Biblical scholars often call Ezekiel mad. He is the Prophet with the flimsiest tether to material reality. The Book of Ezekiel contains many wild visions that, millennia after their composition, retain the power to startle. His images of the Divine are often downright terrifying. Much of his narrative reads like an extended hallucination.
But wait a minute: why should a blazing imagination be treated as a sign of insanity? No matter how intense his storytelling gets, he’s able to discipline his thoughts. The visions are outré, but the presentation is strangely methodical. That God is crazy, frightening, bewildering, and well beyond the limits of human understanding is part of Ezekiel’s point. A sympathetic reader might see the fearsome coherence of Ezekiel’s prophecy as an indication that the guy has got it together.
Something like that might be said about abstract expressionism. Rarely is it as chaotic as it looks. A good abstract expressionist painting is often an attempt to tame, and frame, the tangle. Jill Scipione is probably best known in Jersey City for her dangling spheres made of cloth flowers — blooming kickballs bounced into our line of sight from a place of eternal spring — but she’s an abstract painter, too, and a selection of her tornadic clouds of white lines on gray backgrounds are now on view at the Gallery at the Mac Mahon Student Center (47 Glenwood Ave.) at St. Peter’s University. Scipione cites Ezekiel as an inspiration, and if you’ve read the book, it’s pretty easy to see the connection. Ezekiel, like Scipione, was a searcher for the hard core of meaning inside the whirring electron-shell of instability. His famous valley of dry bones sounds (and is) horrifying, but his vision augurs reanimation.
The day of the Lord is near; a cloudy day.
Do Scipione’s canvases tell a similarly hopeful tale? Are these calcium-white shapes made of thick and flailing brushstrokes getting themselves organized? Some of them do. “Snare of the Fowler,” a dynamic piece painted all the way back in 1993, has a fierce rotational quality that sings the song of centrifugal force. There’s something at the heart of this twisting shape; sometimes, it looks as if Scipione’s arcs of white paint are protecting it, and sometimes everything is simply caught up in the action. Ezekiel wrote about seeing wheels within wheels within wheels, and an endless, irresistible turning and flashing in the sky. “Fowler” seems kinetic in a way that the prophet would have recognized, even if it’s not quite as supernatural as his verse.
That these paintings work is less important than that they move. (The same can be said of Ezekiel’s verses.) Scipione imparts a sense of depth to her canvases by overlaying lines upon lines, pushing the brighter paint toward the surface and rendering the rear strokes in a Twombleyish chalkboard gray. In the stormy “Tent,” the eye travels for miles, past bone-like marks and through ghostly drippings to a neural net hovering in the distance. It’s an illusion, of course, but lots of good things are. Scipione lets an anarchic spirit crackle away in the heart of the piece, but then she gets it under control as painters do: through balance, tonal shading, a curious kind of hidden symmetry, and finally by pinning this thicket on a panel.
Goldberg variations: the red-orange "Canto"
The decision to nip back to the Nineties was not Scipione’s alone. It was the idea of the St. Peter’s curator Beatrice Mady, a creative matchmaker and a specialist in the fruitful juxtaposition of artists who don’t initially seem to go together. In “Gesture and Grid,” which will hang in the Gallery until March 20, Mady presents Scipione’s work next to the colorful pixel-blast paintings of Marsha Goldberg. Scipione’s abstractions look unruly, but they’re actually pretty logical; Goldberg’s eye-tickling squares of tinted dots look as regular as a retinal exam and strategic as the plot of a boardgame, but they’re secretly subversive. They constantly threaten to resolve into a representational image, but they never give us storyteller-types that satisfaction. Instead, they greet the viewer with a bouquet of alluring pastel colors and get increasingly disorienting from there. It’s as easy to lose yourself in Goldberg’s pleasant grid as it is in Scipione’s electric storm.
That bouquet is always bigger than it initially seems like it is. In a pair of lovely “Canto” paintings on yupo paper, no two of the hundreds of dots painted by Goldberg are exactly alike. The painting on the left contains variations on hot orange (but dips into cooler territory) and the bluish one on the right ranges from bright azure to the blushing pink of cirrus clouds at sunset. Goldberg usually groups similar-hued dots together and eases the viewer from one zone of color to the next, but sometimes she’ll drop us right off of a cliff, and switch things up pretty fiercely.
Goldberg's shield: "Rii IV"
“Rii IV” is a great angled chevron of hundreds of colored dots, some russet, some blue, all a little different from their neighbors. Best of all are a clutch of smaller pieces on wood in which the artist has allowed the natural markings of the grain to influence the placement of her dots. In one, circles of dark green part to make way for a sinuous shape that runs, river-like, from the top of the panel to the bottom. To this meaning-obsessed viewer, it looked exactly like a pair of women’s legs. For Goldberg and the tree-god who fashioned the material, it was simply a happy accident. Ezekiel might have seen it as a prophetic sign. You might simply call it beautiful.
(Even though the gallery is open and viewable during school hours, it isn’t always easy for a non-student to get into the Mac Mahon Student Center. In my experience, it’s always possible to tell the security guard at the north entrance that you’re there to see the art. Once in, proceed to the fifth floor. Or you can make it easy on yourself and visit during the next Jersey City Fridays event — March 6 at 5 p.m.)
Tris McCall regularly writes about visual art (and other topics) for NJArts.net, Jersey City Times, and other independent publications. He's also written for the Newark Star-Ledger, Jersey Beat, the Jersey City Reporter, the Jersey Journal, the Jersey City Independent, Inside Jersey, and New Jersey dot com. He also writes about things that have no relevance to New Jersey. Not today, though.
Eye Level is an online journal dedicated to visual art in Jersey City, New Jersey. A new review will appear every Tuesday morning at 8 a.m., and there'll be intermittent commentaries posted to the site in between those reviews.
Eye Level is made possible by an Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant.
