Commentary
Painting is a way of knowing. Whether we make them or simply look at them, paintings reveal to us, like a low-tech user’s guide, how to see the world. Embedded in paintings are multiple lessons: “What do we want to see?” “How are we moved to see it?” “How does this act of seeing show us how we make from the wide world, our own inimitable inner world?”
In Martin Weinstein’s recent series Teresa Paintings, the sense of seeing as an act that both reveals and constructs reality is pervasive. Looking at flowers and vistas and faces with a kind of awe-stuck fascination, Weinstein takes obvious delight in the magic of rendering form in paint. But rather than just luxuriating in the visible, he gives us a heightened sense of the strangeness and poignance that haunts our vision.
Weinstein’s paintings arouse the curious feeling that reality’s spectrum has been extended simultaneously in both in the direction of the hyper-real and of the deconstructed. To achieve this, he radically juxtaposes the close-up and the distant, collapsing dimensional space into a kind of sheer screen upon which reality is projected. This screen is a surrogate for both the observable world and the theater of individual consciousness. This doubleness is further advanced by Weinstein’s use of clear acrylic sheets to layer the various elements of the composite, final image. At times, the result of the layering is a startling 3-D effect. At other times, the illusion is denied by vigorous paint handling, and by making the figure atomized or translucent.
The artist’s wife, Teresa, appears in each of the paintings, and each time she is distinctive, in mood and in her relationship to the natural world. The array of styles that Weinstein uses to represent her seems like a painter’s way of demonstrating the subjectivity of his own imagination. She often appears more than once, as if we and the artist are able to view sequences from multiple periods of time and feeling.
The consequence of seeing Teresa again and again goes beyond the celebration of an ideal subject. We begin to regard her as unfixed and constantly transformed. We catch her lost and found in her garden and in untamed nature, pensive, melancholy, and at peace. Weinstein’s acts of seeing are ways of knowing this face, this persona, this consciousness. And in his paintings is a realization that to truly know these things is to reveal a mystery of unknowable depths.
– John Mendelsohn
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