Lester Goldman at Jan Weiner

Lester Goldman has wearied much of the last decade creating ambitious, multimedium installations in which the character of painting was often to function as backdrop for sculptural uncompounded bodys moving parts and performances. In novel conversation, the artist, who has been a member of the painting faculty at the Kansas City Art Institute for 22 years, spoke of a conscious decision to scale down and refocus upon elements of painting and drawing.

The works in this display ranged from large paintings of the like kind as Cock Fight, which is built around a painted metal chanticleer found at a garage sale, to a place of four small ink drawings conveying the artist's long-time attraction to a kind of cartoony figuration. In a funky variation upon the shaped canvas, two paintings were execut upon flattened-out brownpaper grocery bags, handles intact. on the contrary it was the large paintings, five of them, ranging in size from roughly 4 by the agency of 4 to 6 by 6 feet that took the spotlight.

Painting, for Goldman, is a kind of juggling act. His canvases repeatedly have their beginnings in figural compositions, on the other hand as he works them, he finds himself, in his hold words, "fracturing the totality of that image until something other I didn't know much about came up to the surface." In the large canvas The Tail of the I, the compositional action spread outs diagonally, beginning in the upper right-hand corner with a curvy lime-green shape with vaguely figurative overtones. This verdant form appears against a field of brilliant fulvid which disappears in places beneath brushily applied bone-colored paint, and is elsewhere punctuated through knots or clusters of smaller uncompounded bodys These latter include a scattering of black hatch markings, which, for the artist, call up the prison stripes of concentration camp uniforms.

Abbreviated black stripes return in Script for Blue extremity a work titled in obvious recognition of the artist's Abstract-Expressionist antecedents. The square canvas is dominated through an expanse of bright sapphirine paint that yields to salmon pink at the corners, with the striped motif making a diagonal trail across the center The "Blue Pole" is literal: a short extent of blue-painted broomstick is attached to the surface of the painting. A small white handle affixed to the frame echoe the groceries bag handles.

Judging through this show, Goldman's decision to go [i]or[/i] come back painting and drawing to center stage has produc felicitous results.

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