Gallery Going

By ROBERT MESSENGER
March 18, 2004

Let me begin with a disclosure: Tom Goldenberg is a friend. But I knew him as a first-rate painter well before I knew him as a first-rate man. He is a painter of light: of landscape and how light plays across it. His new show at Salander-O.Reilly is again too small, but it exhibits the latest evolution of his work . his paintings of art.s most storied landscape: Tuscany.

As you look at the paintings you won.t be surprised to learn that he began as an abstractionist. The balance of fields of depiction and color are those of an abstract painter, one who has to think through every stroke with only a small painterly toolbox at his disposal. A Goldenberg painting is a sequence of almost independent shapes that come together as an evocative whole. You won.t take it all in at once.

What is surprising, though, is that Mr. Goldenberg paints from photographs. This is a technique muchly abused in recent years by younger painters who never learned to do the traditional sketching. But Mr. Goldenberg uses it as an aide to imagination. He takes pictures of a landscape back to the confines of his studio and from them sketches the many parts of a single canvas. This is how he creates the discrete sections of his pictures.

The method may be responsible for a Cubist sensibility that shines through in places: a sense of a scene broken down and reconstructed in a hyper-real way. A painting from his 2001 show, .Smithfield,. showed this extremely well, with bare, slim tree trunks and branches breaking up a landscape into obvious sections. The influence is less obvious in the new show, but trees are still the key to the blocking of the paintings.

The show is divided between paintings of Dutchess County and of Tuscany. The former are autumnal landscapes, but these are no dour studies of browns, blacks, and reds. They are explosions of gold; the foliage of high summer blazing out in one last great hurrah. A painting like the large .Grandview. (2003) put me in mind of Breugel.s .Harvesters. at the Met. They both feature the rich hues of fall fields, with many extra details and vistas drawing your eye out to the horizon and then back to the foreground.

Mr. Goldenberg.s rich colors come from one particular source: he grinds his own paints. He uses natural pigments and then painstakingly grinds them on roughened glass before adding linseed oil.The labor gives him breathtaking greens and yellows, shocking blues and reds. His colors can give off the sense of warm, lazy sunshine we all know from country days in August or the bright light that belies the sudden chill of fall days. They are pure evocation.

The finest painting in the present show is .Roundwood. (2002), a forest scene of a path stretching through trees, with the sort of arching trunks that make such paths so charming. Off to the right is Ruggles, the painter.s standard poodle, who adds a rare note of the animal to these landscapes.The star of the painting, though, is the dappled light of autumn, playing through the lush but dying foliage. The picture is like a memory, a feeling called up not by anything so specific as an event but a sense of pleasure in beautiful details. That feeling is, for me, the hallmark of Mr. Goldenberg.s art.

I am less certain of the Tuscan pictures; they are darker and stick in my memory as nocturnes. Only two are confirmed nocturnes, .Nocturne with Moon. and .Italian Nocturne Olive. (both 2003). .Campagna. (2003) is actually set in brilliant daylight. Three others exhibit traits of both day and night, but I think of them as nocturnes because the stagey light is very obviously moonlight, such as you might see in the fourth act of the .Marriage of Figaro. or the wooing scenes in .Romeo. and .Cyrano.. The pictures are also no longer the vistas of Dutchess County, but close-up scenes of crowded foliage and wild-running gardens. I was reminded in places of two very different modern landscape painters: Rousseau and Bonnard.

I say I am less certain about these pictures, and that is because they surprised me with their darkness and the creeping jungle aspects. But, as ever, the painter is far ahead of his audience, seeing things I can.t quite make out. What I could make out were the innumerable sections of magnificent painting in these hothouses: the contrast between the smooth cactus and the slashing delineation of the trees in .Cactus. (2004) or the vibrant and unexpected blues that occur in .Cactus,. .Campagna,. and .Monte Argentario. (2003).

Best of all is .Olive Grove. (2003) with its unexpected perspective. You look at it and see a fine depiction of a Tuscan garden. Then suddenly you note the top of the painting is a view up a valley. The whole scene suddenly shifts, as if a movie camera were panning away.You reel a bit and lose your perspective as you are drawn upward. It.s a masterful effect, something only a first-rate painter who spends his days and nights in pursuit of painterly effect could achieve.

These pictures show Tom Goldenberg continuing to forge ahead, painting landscape in a way that acknowledges his art historical forebears but is absolutely contemporary. I look very much forward to seeing where his searching brush takes us next.