NYAB Event - Paul Waldman Exhibition

Paul Waldman Exhibition

Lennon, Weinberg, Inc.

This event has ended.

Paul Waldman came of age as an artist at a time when the basic tenets of minimalism were being established, and the formal strategy of variation within repetition took root in his work. But the orderly geometries that defined his early work later yielded to the tumult of the organic and the baroque.
He has deployed a menagerie to populate his paintings and sculptures. After the coolly rendered classical nudes of his early work came figures of art-historical origin such as putti and angels, then birds, snakes, cows, camels and lots of dogs. Elephants are the stars of the new works. They are Asian elephants, a regular sight during his annual travels in India and Thailand. They are associated with physical strength and, for Buddhists, strength of the mind.

The paintings in which the elephants appear display a discontinuity of space. For years Waldman’s diptychs have featured a horizon line that shifts at the boundary of the right and left panels, interrupting his otherwise serenely descriptive landscapes. This is still the case with the small diptychs but in the large ones, Waldman has eliminated the horizon altogether in place of dramatic skyscapes. The elephants, described in volumetric detail, hold the surface plane of the painting against the pictorial depth of the sky but their spatial relation to the background is ambiguous. That the elephants generally appear larger on one side of the diptych than the other further disrupts the cohesion of the space. Flocks of birds and flying sprites share the space of both elephants and sky.

The sculptures on the other hand have an uncanny mismatch of scale. The flying sprites of the paintings have come to rest on the bodies of meticulously sculpted elephants. The sculptures are very delicate and fantastically detailed for their small size. They are modeled and carved in clay, fired in sections, assembled and painted with casein. Casein can be gently buffed which results in the soft sheen of the women’s bodies. The sculptures are placed on steel poles and displayed in a row. Sculptures and bas-reliefs of elephants are ubiquitous in Indian temples, and they, along with the historical Indian miniature paintings that Waldman collects, are reflected in his recent work.

Media

• Painting
• Sculpture

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