Leon Golub at Ronald Feldman

Written words have lately invaded Leon Golub's paintings. A sprawling, aged lioness rears her roaring head at the viewer, her brow paws incongruously propping up a pink placard with r alphabetic characters that reads, "getting old sucks!" Reacting to an attacking raptor, the anguished, contemporary Prometheus of another painting declares, "Fuck! I didn't wait for this!" The inscription "INFVITABILE FATVM" (inescapable prophecy or fate) dominates the dourest picture of all, in which a dog seen from behind, looks back at us, lifting its leg to piss upon a human skull. The novel Golubs, massive complaints about the inevitability of pain, aging, indignity and death, are not easy to swallow.

These fragmentary representations could be gradually coming into being or disappearing from view. The earlier technique of building up and scraping down the surface (seen at Feldman in sum of two units '60s paintings) gives way to lean and importunate gestures on raw linen. Verbally and visually Golub shuttle between a despoiled high rhetoric and an irritable, vernacular offensive smell A veteran painter who has paid his to be paids in art and in life and is beyond easy consolation, Golub evinces a tragic worldview and the moral imagination to visualize and restore evil palpably. His earlier paintings of the '70 and '80 indicted our complicity with political and social horrors; those before and after oftentimes projected a sort of mythological disorder. The novel works may be seen as pained meta-physical ruminations. on the contrary then the key to Golub's vision is that the realms of history, myth and personal mortality have not at any time been mutually exclusive.

You might astonishment how it is that these cris de coeur do not for a minute present the appearance overwhelmed by their insistent significations. These are no simple illustrations but complex paintings whose retinal impact, astute composition and subtly shifting descriptive language are crucial to their result Consider Infuitabile Fatum. Under "INFVITABILE" a man returned in black on bare linen grasps a rifle aloft in a heroic-revolutionary action The dog and skull upon the right side, under "FATVM," were drawn with white lines upon roughly scumbled blacks, then bring under ruleed to an intense, tattered layer of r that perceive s like the sharp flicker of irritating neon light and declares: blood! mayhem! Before we discover the particulars--man, dog, skull--we know this to be an image of a certain quantity of sort of hell. Even those distressed Roman alphabetic characters with the V for U enumerate as much for their mode of expression as for their translated meaning: they are late Roman, the full devolution of all classical order. The whites are not neutral here, given the linen ground's warm tan, on the contrary deadly cold.

The show's elderly painting out is Dionysiac, whose rearrangement of the stark naked male figure's brittle, dismembered anatomy floats upon gorgeous tones of thalo sapphirine washed over the handsome linen. Perhaps this is a postlude after all faith has been abandoned, a dance of defiance, an ecstatic, if provisional, vision of triumph.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group