Lynne Golob Gelfman
17 Paintings with Details and Text
Text by Amy Cappellazzo
Joyce Goldstein Gallery
39 Wooster Street, New York, NY
September 11 – October 18, 1997
17 Paintings with Details and Text was published in 1997 for Lynne Golob Gelfman's exhibition 17 New Paintings at the Joyce Goldstein Gallery, New York. The booklet reproduces seventeen oil and acrylic paintings on panel, made in 1996 and 1997, together with photographs of details and short texts by Amy Cappellazzo, then Curator of Exhibitions at the Weatherspoon Art Gallery, University of North Carolina at Greensboro. The texts are printed on translucent paper, each laid over a faint image of the painting it accompanies. The booklet also includes an essay by Cappellazzo, a checklist, and the artist's biography and exhibition history.
The complete booklet is reproduced below, page by page. View the full booklet at full size (PDF).
Essay
17 paintings with details and text
I think painting is the most sincere art practice out there. Lynne Gelfman's paintings helped convince me of this. Gelfman's paintings can make everything else in the room feel like an impostor, including things taken to be perfectly "real," like sun streaming in a window, an object casting a shadow across a table, a collection of props arranged as an installation.
Gelfman's paintings are about integrity of materials, a continual construction and excavation of images and textures and, of course, color. Color is one of the few things in life that has the consumptive power to consistently seduce me—to suck me in and hold me in a rapt, airless moment—and yet, I can never describe adequately what I have seen or experienced. While one may assign description to Gelfman's colors—the color of a blue Slurpee from 7-11, the color of burnt tobacco in the ashtray of a dark room, the color of dried blood on an old band-aid—seeing them is an epiphanic break from theory, context and art history. They just are.
Image and texture in Gelfman's paintings are both part of her own complex speech pattern. Images serve as adjectives, textures as adverbs. In this translation, I get a feeling from looking at Gelfman's paintings like: cinematic/boldly (as in Mrs. Robinson) or torturous/methodically (as in Bloodlet). Every painter seeks to invent her own language and fluently converse in it, but not many develop more advanced parts of speech. She adds (paints) and removes (sands and chips) images and textures to and from her paintings. In some places, she removes more paint than she has added, leaving gouges and wounds in the painting's surface. Gelfman is like the rare person who feels language so thoroughly that she can generously write and cruelly edit her own work.
Which brings me to text for these paintings. One might project that Gelfman's paintings are the horizon line and my text is the figure in the foreground, giving the abstract, non-objective landscape context and a point of representational entry. (Wrong). The way I see it, the paintings are bold and undisguised, my text is fitful and abstruse. The paintings fueled a mood or experience which resulted in words describing that state. This is why abstract painting is so essential to my interior art life—it reminds me that both the painting and I contain the vastness of everything. I hope my words have as much integrity to their source as Gelfman's paintings.
Amy Cappellazzo
August 1997
Checklist
Mrs. Robinson, 1997, oil and acrylic on panel, 15 x 13 x 2 1/2 inches
Kuwait City, Kuwait, 1997, oil and acrylic on panel, 15 x 13 x 2 1/2 inches
Kuwait City, Kuwait, 1997, oil and acrylic on panel, 15 x 13 x 2 1/2 inches
Obfuscation, 1997, oil and acrylic on panel, 12 x 12 x 1 inches
Lorraine Bernardi, 1996, oil and acrylic on panel, 15 x 13 x 2 1/2 inches
Mennes' Nursery, 1997, oil and acrylic on panel, 15 x 13 x 2 1/2 inches
Bloodlet, 1997, oil and acrylic on panel, 15 x 13 x 2 1/2 inches
Gamine (thinking of Betty Parsons), 1997, oil and acrylic on panel, 15 x 13 x 2 1/2 inches
Trucco, 1997, oil and acrylic on panel, 15 x 13 x 2 1/2 inches
Haiku about bleeding in a chlorinated swimming pool, 1996, oil and acrylic on panel, 15 x 13 x 2 1/2 inches
Untitled (Amy's Yellow), 1997, oil and acrylic on panel, 15 x 13 x 2 1/2 inches
Mansard Roof, 1997, oil and acrylic on panel, 15 x 13 x 2 1/2 inches
For Jujol, 1997, oil and acrylic on panel, 15 x 13 x 2 1/2 inches
Four Trout, 1997, oil and acrylic on panel, 12 x 12 x 1 inches each, four panels
Credits
Produced in conjunction with the exhibition at the Joyce Goldstein Gallery, New York, September 11 – October 18, 1997. Edition of 1,000.
Text © 1997 Amy Cappellazzo
Designer: R. Nicholas
Photographer: Teresa Diehl
Printer: Greensboro Printing Company, Greensboro, North Carolina
