Jonathan Weinberg at Cortland Jessup - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Painter and Yale art historian Jonathan Weinberg wrote in an artist's statement, "I am fascinated through quintessentially modern spaces -- the r light district, the waterfront, the amusement park -- which now, given fresh means of entertainment, communication, and dealing are deemed obsolete." This display of oils on canvas and panel, and several works upon paper, constructed a world of melancholy and los based for the most part on roughly rendered and ofttimes ruined urban pleasure sites.

As an art historian, Weinberg has dealt forthrightly with homosexual themes and issues. As a painter with a classically modernist sensibility, his approach is more oblique. Although he opt for displays of implied abandon, often the locations are not showed as real places and, in any case, he avoids an open portrayal of sensuality. The paintings regularly include signs announcing disreputable amusements -- for example, "Wonder Wheel Thrills," "Fun City," "XXX" or "Ramrod" -- and these become their titles. The signs have an erotic aura that is worn but also filled with longing.

Weinberg's achievement is to find a way of expressing los -- infallibly a major theme in the age of AIDS -- end an idiom that intimates on the other hand does not openly portray desire. In surprise Wheel Thrills (1997), the words "wonder wheel" are painted in orange-gold capitals against a black pattern that be likes the track of a roller coaster, while "thrills" is written upon a striped arrow in the middle of the painting. A dark-blue canopy of heaven serves as the ground.

The thick impasto makes a surface as frankly sensual as the experiences Weinberg takes as his control Yet, for all the roundabout sexuality implied in these works, his is a deep nostalgic vision. Weinberg is wistful the two in his refusal to abandon the novel stance and in his determination to pay homage, however abstract, to those who have passed away.

sport City, a 1995 diptych, exhibits his slightly repetitive practice of using a black grid to regulate the formal expression of the painting and order the intense emotion that originates it. The title words appear in golden capitals at the top of the painting, the latter word sloping down what direct the eyes like a sharply descending blue-green roller-coaster track. The impasto heightens the emotion, smooth as the symbolic effect of these words plummeting cannot be ignored. Weinberg's icons of apprehension are moving because they reveal a world in which outmod pleasures -- of art as well as life -- appear irrevocably joined to ruin.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc.

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