ART REVIEWS

Allure and Illusion: In his large recent paintings, Jack Goldstein lays out cold, brash geometric designs next to images of nearly perfect natural objects: human skin and eggshells. But rather than looking with the naked eye at these organic coverings, he paints from blow-ups of microscopic details, generated by a computer.

A patch of skin looks like a topographic map and the surface of an eggshell becomes a vast, delicately modulated surface striated with faint vertical lines. These painstakingly linear paintings are carefully worked up with a strictly controlled palette of darks and lights, as unvarying as a musical scale. The images are the updated equivalents of still life paintings in which every detail is captured with exacting precision.

Goldstein’s longtime subject has been the allure and illusion of surfaces and images. As if failing to trust the normal appearance of skin and eggshells, the artist insists on trading his everyday vision for what might be considered a more scientifically accurate view. But there’s no way he can transcribe the absolute essence of these objects. As he once wrote, “There is always a distance--a space--between us and the world, that frustrates our attempt to get closer to that world.”

Framing each image are vertical blocks painted with bold designs (racetrack ovals, stylized stalactites and stalagmites, stripes and zigzags), screaming with Neo Geo-style color and sometimes jutting forward as if desperate to flag the viewer’s attention. These ungainly contrivances are perhaps meant as reminders of the artificiality of trying to picture the unpicturable.

Two works are watercolors of skin and eggshell surfaces in glass-covered boxes with Mondrian-like designs painted in the shallow recess between the paper and the glass. The boxes serve to isolate the works as precious objects, a tactic that is becoming something of a cliche these days, however. The designs allude to the abstract symbolism of “universal harmony” developed by Mondrian and fellow members of the de Stijl group. The subject here seems to be the inability of art--despite its claims--to represent anything other than itself.