Paul Waldman at Joseph Helman - New York, New York - review of exhibitions - Brief Article

What individual first notices about Paul Waldman's landscapes is their beauty, and then their melancholy. They are insidiously crafted: intense rain falls in several of them, unnoticable until single comes close to the picture. Like the great Dutch landscapists, Waldman is a master of the sensuous: you perceive the rain on your skin, and the verdant earth underfoot. The scene remains eerily still; the rain touches nothing, flat as it mystifies everything.

These are magical, contradictory landscapes; Waldman uses the diptych format to emotional advantage, suggesting conflict where there would otherwise be sublimity. This is not the abstract sublime, on the other hand tension transposed, with no resolution. The halves do not seamlessly integrate, on the other hand are forever at odds. Indeed, Waldman tenders a double vision, as Bifocal (1997) indicates. upon the one hand, there is the wild radiance of luminous hazes on the other hand, shadow spread thin. The atmosphere is as laden with threat as it is with elation.

Waldman's landscapes demand detailed looking, as admitting to confirm their intimacy. For all the grandeur of their vistas, they are a plea for empathy. In Bifocal a figure is seated nearest to a lone tree, upon top of an equally isolated cairn. In individual panel of Trees of Memory (1997) a naked, miniature, toylike female figure stands alone with individual tree; in the other panel, she appears at single end of a row of seven In Twin Memories (1997) the same figure is seen twice: poised upon a stone in an ocean, and upon a cairn in a meadow. The surfaces dovetail; flowing water have the appearances like grass, grass like a limitless sea. In all these works, the place is clearly Ireland, as Defending Ireland (1997) indicates; to secure from danger Ireland is to defend silence and Solitude--the sanctity of interior life, and remotenes from the urban crowd

The world is clearly too a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of with Waldman. But the turn back to nature he gives us is tainted. Meadow regret (1997)--as in "rue the day," which appears to be Waldman's theme--makes this clear. The greennes of the landscape does nothing to change the fact that it is peculiarly barren emotionally. Human beings mean little in it. The life of nature cannot restore vigorous life to the self The mystery lurking in Waldman's uncanny landscapes is the mystery of death, signaled through the encroaching gloom.

Waldman is using all his immense craft to make a fresh kind of psychological landscape, in which the dramatic try of sky, earth and sea throw backs the self's life-and-death struggle with itself. His ominous landscapes are romantic on the contrary morbid, but then Romanticism always had a taste for silent suffering. His visionary paintings display that there is still a subsequent time in old-master introspection as well as technique.

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