Artist on a Daring Mission

Just inside the front door of the Luckman Gallery at Cal State L.A. hangs a painting made of three big masonite panels covered with jet black enamel. Each contains a small, realistically rendered astronaut. With no mother ship in sight, and with oxygen tubes dangling from their hermetically sealed suits like severed umbilical cords, the lost spacemen are utterly alone, completely detached from anything that might bring them back to terra firma.

Being alienated from one’s surroundings is an experience shared by many artists, especially in a utilitarian culture such as ours, which values productivity above all else. Ever since Romanticism, artists have been called on to explore the furthest reaches of experience, where they are supposed to discover (and bring back to the rest of us) the last vestiges of freedom in a world increasingly overrun by prepackaged sensations and warmed-over amusements.

Jack Goldstein’s triptych from 1979 gives chilling form to the idea that contemporary artists bravely go where no man has gone before. His little astronauts have done so, and they’ve either died trying or are about to. Goldstein doesn’t even let them enjoy the view, which should be spectacular. Having stripped every star from the heavens, he has abandoned his astronauts to absolute blackness. This leaves viewers free to contemplate the endless nothingness of the void--or of art that has no connection to the real world.

But Goldstein’s untitled work doesn’t merely mock the idea of painting’s autonomy. Turning away from the sterile fantasy of high art, it embraces more pedestrian references. Its three-part format recalls frames of film, still images that tell entertaining stories when seen in sequence. The triptych’s bright yellow frames evoke the tape police use to seal off crime scenes. And its Plexiglas covers turn it into something of a time capsule.

These elements recur throughout the exhibition, which is itself a sort of time capsule. Organized by gallery director Julie Joyce, its 11 large paintings date from 1979 to 1990, about a year before Goldstein stopped making art.

Up until then, he had created an impressive body of work that includes short films, experimental records and meticulously scripted performances. (A survey of these was presented last fall at 1301PE , a gallery on Wilshire.) Born in Montreal in 1945, educated in Los Angeles (at Chouinard and CalArts) and based in New York, Goldstein exhibited internationally, sold regularly and received a fair share of critical attention. Then he just quit.

Although none of his dazzlingly cool works were meant to be autobiographical, it’s hard not to see his 1979 painting as a self-portrait, a picture of the artist on the verge of losing his link to the world and drifting out of sight. In 1993 Goldstein moved back to Los Angeles, where he has been lying low, teaching an occasional seminar and working on a 10,000-page book of his musings.

The exhibition is focused and timely. Over the last decade, many young painters, including Philip Argent, Stephen Heer and Adam Ross, have taken up subjects similar to those Goldstein explored. Others, such as Tim Bavington, Brad Spence, Amy Wheeler and Yek, have used similar techniques, airbrushing blurry forms to create sexy images and hot, hands-off effects.

Most important, Goldstein’s show concisely outlines the ways his art grew in complexity, ambition and accomplishment in the 1980s. After the first work, almost charming in its handmade simplicity, he turned to aerial and ground photographs of nighttime firefights from World War II.

Three of these black-and-white paintings, from 1981, depict barrages of antiaircraft artillery. A fourth, from 1984, swoops in for a rooftop view of a church’s twin spires silhouetted against a fiery blaze. All four resemble breathtaking fireworks displays. They are nearly, but not quite, gorgeous enough to let you forget about the unseen destruction that accompanied them.

In the next group Goldstein adds color, increases the sophistication of his visual effects and turns his attention to natural phenomena. One 8-foot-square painting from 1983 zeros in on a total eclipse, transforming the rare occurrence into a target’s bull’s-eye. Two works from 1985 depict a pair of erupting volcanoes or two clusters of lightning bolts. Rendered with scientific precision in a palette so cool it’s hot, they make you feel as if you’re seeing double.

The last group of paintings Goldstein made intensifies the hallucinatory beauty of images derived from science and technology. The show’s best ones, from 1988, resemble supersaturated enlargements of images transmitted via heat-sensitive monitors. Made of concentric bands of fluorescent color that radiate outward from glowing hot spots, these labor-intensive paintings echo the format of contour maps.

Although the edges of each band are razor sharp, the subtle shifts in color from one to the next make them look blurry. Clarity and ambiguity collide in these optically animated abstractions, which cause viewers to keep blinking in an attempt to disentangle truth from illusion. Depicting a radically enlarged microscopic view of human skin, a painting from 1990 does something similar in a palette of icy reds. Metallic paint and repeated geometric forms add a sci-fi component to all of these hallucinatory works.

As a whole, “Jack Goldstein: Paintings From the 1980s” shows the artist to be a master at capturing some of the mystery that lurks just beneath reality’s surface. But an even bigger enigma haunts the exhibition, infusing it with bittersweet poignancy.

You can’t help but wonder what Goldstein would be painting today if he hadn’t abandoned his talents. In this sense, the show attests to the hidden costs of creativity, the invisible difficulties that sometimes make being an artist an impossible proposition.

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“Jack Goldstein: Paintings From the 1980s,” Luckman Gallery, California State University Los Angeles, 5151 State University Drive, (323) 343-6610, through July 7. Closed Fridays and Sundays.