The Philadelphia Inquirer
Published November 8, 2009
Goodman downsizes
by Edith Newhall
Philadelphia has no shortage of artists of all ages making gestural, colorful, mostly abstract paintings, but Robert Goodman reenergizes this manner of painting with so much painterly bravado, and with such broad references to art history, nature, and popular culture (including digital technology), that his paintings manage to stand out. If you saw his immense painting Net at Moore College of Art & Design last summer, you've seen what I mean.
Goodman can fit a world into a smaller painting, too, though, as his current show at Seraphin Gallery demonstrates. Geo (2009), a sprawling work with intersecting planes of DayGlo orange, parrot green, and hot pink against a grid of like-minded colors, and Geo II, about half its dimensions and also from this year, prove the point ecstatically.
Philadelphia City Paper "Last Chance"
Catch It or Regret It
By Holly Otterbein
Published: Oct 21, 2009
Like the Brothers Grimm fairy tales, Hiro Sakaguchi's paintings in the exhibit "Idle Daydream" invoke a complex, knotty fear — one that cleverly layers horror in between preciousness, childlike innocence and pastel colors. "People read my work as scary," says Sakaguchi. "Scary like a tiny stuffed bear holding a knife."
Take Bear Fishing (pictured), in which the Japanese-born local artist paints a dozen airplanes paddling eagerly upstream like fish, while being ripped in half by a Godzilla-size bear. Meanwhile, a rainbow glows in the right-hand corner, it's a beautiful day out, and a few tourists look onto the scene, seemingly unfazed. Does the scary-pretty piece comment on overpopulation? Globalism gone wild? Nature eventually swallowing man whole? Or is it simply about the fear of planes?
Kinda? "That idea came from a nature show, where salmon, after they grow up, returned to where they were born to lay eggs," says Sakaguchi, who moved to Philly 18 years ago. "And they go through all that trouble to get home only to be eaten by bears. I started associating the salmon with myself, when I take a plane to go back to my home, Japan."
Planes pop up frequently in Sakaguchi's works, which, in addition to his trips to Japan, may have something to do with the fact that he often watches the horizon speckle with them from his home near the Philadelphia International Airport. In School of Pinwheel Airplanes, there's such a critical mass of planes that the scene appears warlike. But, as usual, the chaos is inconsistent: The sky is bubbly blue, and the townhouses below the planes are unscathed.
Tying all this cutesiness and terror together is Sakaguchi's greatest talent — his disarming painting style, which is modest, youthful and akin to comic-book illustrations. "When you're a child, you're drawing your imagination onto paper, so you try to be as clear in your drawing as possible," he says. "My work is ethereal, so I try to do the same thing and paint as simply as I can."
Ends Oct. 27, Seraphin Gallery, 1108 Pine St., 215-923-7000, seraphin.squarespace.com.
Posted on Fri, Sep. 25, 2009
Hiro Sakaguchi exhibits at Seraphin Gallery.
Paintings offering a mixture of memory and artistic fantasy
By Victoria Donohoe
For The Inquirer
Bear Fishing, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 30" x 40"
Hiro Sakaguchi catches us off guard.
One moment, he could pass for an underground comic-book artist. The next moment, his paintings are being taken seriously by persons usually tuned in only to the higher reaches of artistic culture.
In Sakaguchi's exhibit "Idle Daydreams," at Seraphin Gallery, his rare combination of talents is on full view. Here's a Japanese-born local artist choosing unusual subject matter, yet portraying it with traditional forms.
Images in his work range from startlingly expansive to quite intimate, and they convey continuity with the past while embracing the present - all in the same picture.
Airplanes have fascinated Sakaguchi since his early childhood in Japan, and again now that he lives near Philadelphia International Airport.
This show's main airplane subject, poised between beatitude and anguish, is the Bear Fishing scene, so appealing and outdoorsy. It also is seemingly tranquil, until you realize that the "salmon" swimming upstream and caught as it leaps the waterfall by the bear is actually a modern-day passenger airliner.
Also, there are frequent war-image references throughout the display, most notably in Great Wall. It portrays an old Soviet armored tank, a Humvee with rocket launcher, a Civil War battalion, and a da Vinci tank - all actively trying to destroy the Chinese wall protecting a distant house.
Sakaguchi's mix of memory and fantasy in his art takes its cue from boredom he felt as a child. "I am trying to recapture what I was never able to do as a child with the means I have now," he said.
Having successfully achieved works that are visually compelling and at times conceptually disturbing, Sakaguchi now faces the challenge of moving beyond it.
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Posted on Sun, Jul. 5, 2009
Art: Dramatic drawings need not defer
Philadelphian Sidney Goodman invests as much in them as in his paintings.
In the hierarchy of art media, painting traditionally trumps drawing, which was for centuries a means of capturing impressions and testing compositional ideas. This is no longer true, nor, as far as I can tell, has it ever been so for Sidney Goodman.
One of Philadelphia's most successful, respected, and influential artists, the 73-year-old Goodman has always drawn prolifically, and has always invested as much energy, intellect, and emotion in his major drawings as he does in his paintings.
It's significant, for instance, that more than 40 percent of the works in his 1996 retrospective exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art were drawings.
Now the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where Goodman has taught since 1978, has put up a show of 64 drawings and watercolors made over the last 30 years.
Selected by Julien Robson, curator of contemporary art, the show delivers the equivalent power and complexity of the 1996 retrospective. If you haven't seen any other show of Goodman's art, "Man in the Mirror" puts you dead center in his world.
(The Goodman show is half of a concurrent pair of PAFA retrospectives featuring longtime academy instructors who are among the city's artistic elite. The other features painter Elizabeth Osborne. A commentary on her show, "The Color of Light," will appear July 19.)
Goodman is a figurative artist, but not necessarily a realist. He is as much concerned with what visual representation can't reveal as he is with what registers on the retina. Both his paintings - some of these are on view at Seraphin Gallery through July 28 - and his drawings typically address intangibles such as states of mind, emotions, dreams, and fantasies.
Ambiguity and duality are his bywords. Many drawings suggest more than one interpretation, which can be maddening for viewers who expect an image composed of recognizable forms to make complete sense. Even Goodman's portraits of his immediate family, perhaps the most conventional pictures in the show, suggest layers of meaning beyond documentation.
Add to that the fact that Goodman is relentless in exposing human foibles, fears, failings, and barbarities, even his own. His drawings can be rough going for the squeamish because gratuitous violence and its consequences are a common theme.
Some drawings are bluntly and even grotesquely erotic (Urban Lovers, Bodies in Motion, Love Knot) and others, particularly Birth Control and The Struggle, are violently confrontational.
Goodman isn't all hard knocks and rough edges; his drawings of his wife, Pam, and his three children, Luke, Maia, and Amanda, and of his late mother expose his tender side. He's not sentimental, but he's consistently capable of touching intimacy.
He draws with vigorous, sweeping strokes, usually in charcoal, which produces heavy black outlines and dense passages of shadow. Darkness dominates, for instance, in Urban Lovers and Child Near Source, which depicts a young Luke standing next to a large tree. In this, the area of penumbral darkness is relieved, and dramatized, by a bright blaze of sunlight on the tree trunk.
In some drawings, the stark heaviness is counterpointed by blushes of lush color, usually a shade of red or red-orange, rendered in pastels. The color sometimes represents blood, as in Bloody Head With Fist, but more often it provides feminizing counterpoint, especially when used to highlight skin.
The most notable example is Night Vision, in which a dormant female nude is juxtaposed against the ominous, writhing coils of what might be a giant serpent.
Such striking contrasts are common in Goodman's drawings. He has expressed a fascination with light effects, but it's also possible that the near-absence of light stands metaphorically for those truths about human behavior and the psyche that evade direct observation. This tension between what can be seen and what can only be imagined constitutes the foundation of Goodman's art.
He composes with three basic ingredients - observation, readily recognized in images of his children; memory; and imagination. The last sometimes takes the form of implausible or humorous fantasy - Goodman self-portrayed in a boxer's stance while balancing himself on a large ball, or Goodman leering at three tiny Wonder Woman dolls.
The ball image could be a comment on the precariousness of life itself, an eternal balancing act, or on the way artists, especially this artist, struggle to reconcile the demands of art-making and truth-telling with being a father and husband, with being honest in art and in life.
Goodman is a severe judge of human nature; he's particularly censorious of the mindless violence so prevalent in American cities, the gratuitous brutality that keeps tabloid newspapers and the 6 o'clock news in business. He doesn't spare himself this scrutiny, he doesn't stand apart from the passing parade of hapless humanity beset by doubt, immobilized by fear, or derailed by passion.
These conditions are usually conveyed by symbols such as the serpentlike coils reminiscent of the famous classical sculpture the Laocoön Group; by large spheres, which surround and support a young Luke in Birthday, and which suggest instability or uncertainty; and by scenes of violence or chaos.
In its gravity and its unsparing emotional intensity, Goodman's art revivifies late 19th-century symbolism while obliquely recalling the demonic power of Francisco Goya in his Disasters of War suite and also, to a lesser extent, in Los Caprichos. Goodman's drawings are essence, not entertainment or diversion. They're more often disturbing than soothing. They might give you bad dreams, but they will also expand your consciousness.
Paintings at Seraphin. The current Goodman show at Seraphin Gallery of nine oils, two drawings, and a lithograph helps to put the academy exhibition in context. The paintings depict images of destruction, chaos, anxiety, confinement, rage and struggle, all encoded symbolically.
Like the drawings, the paintings tend to be muscular, both in the way they're brushed and in the contorted features of some of the protagonists, especially two men climbing opposite sides of a pinnacle. Even son Luke is shown encoiled, like Laocoön and his sons, in yellow plastic caution tape.
But in one corner of the gallery, gentility and repose assert themselves in an unusual sleeping nude. The model, apparently Goodman's wife, is bifurcated. Her torso and legs occupy the top portion of the canvas, while her head and shoulders anchor the bottom, like a magician's partner sawn in half. In this case, the parts are more intriguing than the whole.
Art: Man in the Mirror
"Sidney Goodman: Man in the Mirror" continues in the Hamilton building of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Broad and Cherry Streets, through Sept. 20. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.Tuesdays through Saturdays and 11 to 5 Sundays. Admission to special exhibitions (includes permanent collection) is $15 general, $12 for seniors and students with ID, and $8 for visitors 5 through 18. Information: 215-972-7600 or www.pafa.org.
"Sidney Goodman: Strange Clarity" continues at Seraphin Gallery, 1108 Pine St., through July 28. Hours are 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays. Information: 215-923-7000 or www.seraphingallery. com.
Praise for My Dog Speaks, Curated by Hiro Sakaguchi
Selected as a "Hot Curatorial Pick" by The Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania.
"Peering Into the Darker Side of the Animal World" in The Philadelphia Inquirer
Edith Newhall
After a long-running scholarly exhibitions of Harry Bertoia drawings that was beginning to look like a permanent installation, Seraphin Gallery has sprung back into action with what you initially might assume to be of those lighthearted summer crowd-pleasers. But “My Dog Speaks: Animal Narrative in Contemporary Art,” a group sow organized by painter Hiro Sakaguchi and featuring works by 13 artists in which animals take center stage, in generally more poignant, puzzling and dark than cute.
Sarah McEneaney, who often has portrayed her own animal companions in her paintings, set the show’s slightly unsettling tone with her large tempera painting, Dog Heaven (2008) – ostensibly of a lush green city dog park overrun with playful canines of all sorts, but in fact a group portrait of formerly living dogs the artists knew – and also with Peggy (2005), a small gouache of a dog seeking shade under a palm tree.
Though Bonnie Brenda Scott’s mural is about the first piece you’ll see on entering the gallery – and y ou can’t miss her sprawling pink-and-orange painting of what appear to be wolves and human figures made of intestines –her small mixed-media pieces, Trouble at the Hen House and Trouble at the Hen House II (both 2009), drawn and painted on actual hunters’ target sheets for coyotes, seem to emblemize human anger at animal transgressors.
Darla Jackson’s two sculptures, All the Times... (2007) and Cheap (Delusions of Grandeur Series) (2005), cast a frankly somber mood.
The former, a likeness of a sleeping or dead fawn whose skin is etched with crossed-out numerals, and the latter, a cast of a dead baby bird atop a rectangular bronze slab, warns of the consequences of environmental negligence. Nancy Sophy and Eric McDade also conjure the fragility of nature in their solemn, although very different, images of birds.
John Karpinski, Anne Canfield, Sherif Habashi, Caroline Picard, and collaborators Alina Josan and Amanda Miller create more obvious narratives in their drawings and paintings than any of the other artists in this show, and they also are more inclined to far-fetched whimsy. Their “stories” are like fairy tales gone askew or awry.
Laura McKinley’s riff on early American portraiture, Shilly-Shally (2008), has no narrative whatsoever, but her black-and-white kittens are mesmerizing.
"Animal Collective: Seraphin Gallery Takes a Walk on the Wild Side" in Philadelphia Weekly.
Through the years, artists have devoted gallons of paint and tons of plaster, clay and metal to the depiction of animals. “My Dog Speaks” at Seraphin Gallery is a mixed-media exhibit featuring work by 13 artists. Each piece was created using animals as the central figure. Through the work, the artists highlight the relationship between humans and wildlife—ranging from beloved pets to untamed beasts.
Darla Jackson’s small sculpture of a sleeping deer on a white pedestal feels as mythological as a unicorn, only far more vulnerable.
Bonnie Brenda Scott painted images of ghost animals, crystals, clouds and words like “PLEASE” and “TROUBLE” on hunters’ target practice sheets. Around the sheets, Scott painted a mural of writhing animals, and the effect is shamanistic—as if the artist were attempting to dispel evil spirits. The mural is a powerful work in a quiet show—weird for its colors (pink and orange) and for its evocation of smoke, viscera and tortured souls.
Sarah McEneaney’s pet portraits are on the other side of the spectrum. Dog Heaven imagines the best, greenest dog park ever for her beloved dead pets and those of her friends, all lovingly depicted while playing.
Likewise, Laura McKinley’s Shilly-Shally is a straightforward portrait of a serious young woman in a black-and-white striped shirt holding two nearly identical black and white cats. Perhaps a deadpan family portrait, the work is a contemporary update on early American portraits by Ammi Phillips, who loved to show children and animals in her work.
Alina Josan and Amanda Miller’s collaborative altar pieces are lovely and spiritual in their leanings. Caitlin Emma Perkins’ drawing of a singing mouse and Anne Canfield’s drawing of cats steering a gondola are both picture-book-perfect evocations of imaginary animal friends.
“My Dog Speaks” contains 26 original pieces and runs through June 9.
Victor Vazquez: Art Net Magazine, 06.06.08
Victor Vázquez, Iconographer
MAP chief curator Cheryl Hartub collaborated with the artist Victor Vázquez in the translation of several of his most memorable images into a museum installation, titled "Dialogues." With eight light boxes and two other sculptural works, the project manages to re-contextualize the MAP permanent collection at the same time that it gives new life to Vázquez’ sepia-toned photographs addressing questions of body politics.
My favorite juxtaposition between old and new was Mattress and Ball (2005), a work that features a pair of free-standing photographs of a soccer ball sitting amidst a messy tangle of hair and dirt on top of a used mattress. An obvious homage to Arte Povera, the work looked elegantly out of place in MAP’s pristine galleries, not to mention juxtaposed with Vanitas (1678), a 17th-century painting by Pieter Gerritsz Van Roestraeten. But both artists present the eternal conflict between life and all its stuff and the dark finality of death. In Vanitas, the material world is symbolized by a shiny black-and-gold lacquered chest with elaborate Rococo mounts. For Vázquez, materiality is represented by a small tin can holding a toy soccer ball (like a coffin) that sat on the floor, not far from the two photos. Painted on the floor, beside the can, is a bold question mark.
Vázquez took a chance at syncretism by mixing Catholic iconography with the Afro-Caribbean religious traditions of Santeria in a two-sided light box placed in the Spanish Baroque wing. The image that stood out is Still Life for Yemayá (1994), in which a foot pierced by nails calls to mind martyrdom and crucifixion. As the title refers to the name of the Santeria deity Yemayá, the foot in front of Francisco de Zurbaran’s The Crucifixion (1630) seemed to question assumptions we all have about faith and the common denominators in the representation of its iconography.
Victor Vázquez’s Still Life for Yemayá at the Museo de Arte de Ponce
Nicholas Hayes on "Useless Weapons" at the Green Lantern, Chicago
Terrorism has entered into popular culture. The fear that the acts and anticipation of potential violence remains palpable but fades into the background of a media-saturated culture where the Twin Towers' collapsing, the horrifying beauty of shock and awe bombing and the charming Geico gecko, have equal shares of our attention as they are perpetually repeated. These concerns seem to be principle in the "Useless Weapons" group exhibition at the Green Lantern. In "Useless Weapons", Green Lantern Director Caroline Picard and Philadelphia painter Hiro Sakaguchi have assembled paintings and installations from Chicago and Philadelphia to explore this theme.
Sakaguchi's paintings hover between a lyrical reading of reality and an obsession with the fantasy of war play. In his "USS New Jersey", the watery acrylic bleeds through the abrupt sketches of hands. The making of a model is shown juxtaposed to battleships at the docks. The equation contains is efficient and objective, neither condemning nor glorifying the innate violence in war play. This ambiguity, this ambivalence, is even more evident in "Puling Tank." Here the tension between play and reality is taut as a rhinoceros beetle and a tank engage in a tug of war across a minimal canvas damasked with a pale purple and green.
Hiro Sakaguchi, Pulling Tank
University City Review- February 2008|
By R.B. Strauss
Tensile, tactile, and always unexpected, Joan Wadleigh Curran’s paintings grab hold of the back of your neck with their gritty take on mundane imagery that morphs any junkyard into a paradise of sorts. Here, she offers up a pair of rooftops topped with twists of wire that coil of their own animated volition, as well as a lone graphite drawing that also channels the wire in hypnotic fashion.
Joan Wadleigh Curran, left-right: Security #1, Security #2
Art in America - January 2008
Natalie Alper at Seraphin Gallery by Anne Fabbri
artblog - October 1, 2007
Goodman and Sakaguchi at Seraphin, by Libby Rosof
Robert Goodman, Zzip, 2007
30 x 30 inches, oil, acrylic and spraypaint on canvas
Robert Goodman and Hiro Sakaguchi may seem like a surprising pairing. Their paint application and their content are so far apart. But perhaps that's why the two of them at Seraphin Gallery, until Oct. 7, do not step on one another's toes.
Zzip detail
Robert Goodman: Night Vision is painting as fireworks. The abstractions have a feeling of spontaneity and the look of the urban, neon landscape captured by a camera in motion. They have depth and space, they have light, they have detail and they have a marvelous sense of juicy painterly marksmanship. Although they have the motion I associate de Kooning's and Pollock's abstract expressionism, they are cooler. Goodman manages to mix beauty and edginess all at once!
Goodman is a Tyler MFA. He had a Fleisher Challenge exhibition last year.
Hiro Sakaguchi, Wind, Flower and Farewell #2, 2006
21 x 16, synthetic polymer paint on canvas
As juicy, abstract and explosive as Goodman's work is, the work in Hiro Sakaguchi: Traveler's Tale is personal and low-key, Sakaguchi continues his dreamy, washy drawings on canvas, telling over and over again the story of his emigration from Japan to the U.S., using repeating motifs. Sakaguchi uses a fragile unpainterliness that's closer to the watercolor-and-ink travel journal tradition than to works on canvas - a coating of Japanese brush traditions atop the coarse canvas. But unlike the work in travel journals, the narrative here is less of discovery than of a sense of loss.
Sakaguchi was a 2004 Fleisher Challenge winner with an MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
The walls rained little red dots for both of these exhibits!
Philadelphia Inquirer - Art [September 14, 2007]
Cries and Whispers, by Edith Newhall
Different as their paintings are, Robert Goodman and Hiro Sakaguchi are well paired at Seraphin Gallery. Goodman is a color-infatuated abstractionist whose paintings suggest jarring ruptures, spinning out of control, turmoil; Sakaguchi's faintly colored representational paintings are clearly tied to his memories and experiences of his native Nagano, Japan, but are as elusive as dreams.
Together, Goodman and Sakaguchi give you a pretty good idea why young artists in the digital age are putting paint to canvas: it's one of the last outlets for visceral personal expression that leaves its creators some privacy.
The first time I saw Goodman's work, a year ago in a group show here, I thought his raw, jagged compositions and psychedelic colors were an attempt at deliberately "bad" painting that didn't succeed. Now that I've seen an entire room of his works, though, I realize they are much more stylish and thought-out than that. Together, they create a contagious rapturous energy. The two large canvases in this show, Collapse and Electrical Storm, display Goodman's abstracted Mad Max-like dramas in a way the smaller works can't quite muster.
Sakaguchi, whose small paintings are tucked into the gallery's back room, is a quiet, compelling storyteller, whose images of a hiker, planes and ships seemed arranged through a kaleidescope. They're the perfect foil to Goodman's hyperkinetic visions of angst.
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Konnichiwa, Philadelphia - Japan America Society of Greater Philadelphia
Konnichiwa, Philadelphia. This week's entry highlights the Seraphin Gallery's current exhibition of the works of Japanese-Philadelphian Hiro Sakaguchi, a young drawer/painter whose work self-purportedly aims to render “a fictional realm that is relevant to [his] experience as an artist and an individual in this global society.” Often recognized for its sensitivity to place, Sakaguchi's work reflects an experience widely affected by a life spent between Philadelphia and Japan – of particular interest for its artistic insights into Japan-America globalization, and more specifically, its fresh bi-cultural presentation of life in Philadelphia.
Sakaguchi was born in Nagano, grew up in Tokyo, and during his twenties came to America to pursue scholarship in the fine arts. A resident of Philadelphia since 1990, he obtained a Bachelor's degree from The University of the Arts and a Master's from The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, developing a style which reflects influences of Western academia and Japanese animation in both technique and subject matter.
Sakaguchi's raw, unfinished renderings in watercolor and graphite impart a distinct sense of fleeting observation, often devoting attention to mundane subjects in a way which may invoke an aesthetic sensibility of traditional painting and poetry. At the same time, Sakaguchi creates a dreamlike, fictional atmosphere by presenting an unexpected arrangement of familiar objects. Amidst common streetscapes, buses motor along inverted roads in the sky, planes flow in a congested stream with a lighthearted meander, and a giant airship hovers over town in apparent celebration – a Final Fantasy-esque speculative fiction grounded in provocative observations of the non-fictional world. Neither overtly admiring nor condemning, these dreamlike visions of speculative landscapes are given merit by their seemingly innocent mode of observation.
In addition to his dabbling in speculative fiction, Sakaguchi is known for drawing from memory a sense of nostalgia that pervades much of his work – the Seraphin Gallery exhibit “A Traveler's Tale” aims to depict his Japanese-American journey in a way which reveals a longing for times and places now passed by. In A Pinwheel Spins, a pink pinwheel sits in the center of an otherwise colorless page and evokes both the children's toy of 19th century America and the shapes of traditional Japanese origami. In two corners of the page, gentle streetscapes are rendered in graphite – in the top left, a couple strolls peacefully past homes identifiably Japanese in structure, while in the bottom right, cars roll by a lofty building in an ostensibly Western locale. Sakaguchi's delicate rendering of these two contrasting settings suggests a desire to be in both places at once – a desire then confronted by the realization that the only object capable of such omnipresence is the pinwheel, which could be seen as a symbol for time or transience.
These works by Sakaguchi have been widely appreciated through over 25 exhibitions in the past ten years and will surely be well received at the Seraphin Gallery exhibit “A Traveler's Tale,” open from September 7 until October 7, 2007. Do not miss this opportunity for aesthetic enjoyment and insight into the Japanese-American experience made all the more intimate by its specificity to the city of Philadelphia.
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"Broad Street Review"
An Old Master at 71, still growing
ANNE R. FABBRI
Welcome home, Sidney Goodman. It’s been a long, long time, and we missed you. This exhibition of 20 paintings and drawings by one of Philadelphia’s most prestigious artists is the first in this city since Goodman’s major exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1996. And now the art world has caught up with him.
Goodman’s work looks as if he must have been the mentor for all the young artists featured in New York’s Chelsea galleries. Images from photographs, with all their distortions of depth and focus, in high intensity colors, define today’s art. Goodman began it years ago, and he’s still in the lead. He might be an Old Master of 71, but his work continues on the edge.
Goodman follows the traditional dictum: Never complain; never explain. You, the viewer, interpret each painting however you please. Or just immerse yourself in the sensuous painterly quality of each one and forget about story-telling. Man in Water (1999), depicts only a man’s head above the water. It looks like a self-portrait, reminding us that most art is autobiographical. There is no struggle, so the subject must be an expert swimmer, enjoying the refreshing dip in gently moving water. Goodman, with charcoal and pastels on paper, has managed to communicate all the pleasurable sensations of a late afternoon dip mid-summer.
A riff on renaissance Madonnas
The Struggle (1995-1996), another charcoal and pastel on paper 58” x 42,” creates a maelstrom of intertwined male and female figures. Women’s swelling breasts protrude between men’s legs on the lower right center. Female legs can be followed separately from the hairy, masculine limbs weaving throughout the knot of figures. It definitely portrays men and women in turmoil, beautifully rendered throughout. What does it mean? Who cares? The art is in the work itself; read into it whatever you want. Goodman is not a narrative painter. He is a visual artist.
Goodman’s figures are as realistic as those of John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage— last year’s stars of the New York art scene— but they’re not meant to recall individuals encountered on the street. Instead they are images with a different purpose. The large, 46” x 70” Floating Woman with Men (2005, oil on canvas), is a beautifully painted riff on all those Renaissance Madonna paintings depicting a full-bodied Madonna floating through the air while the male Apostles stand helplessly, looking up. Think of Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin in the Frari Church, Venice. Goodman’s female figure just exists. She’s not questioning her unusual situation; again, it is all up to you, the viewer.
Legs Above, Head Below (2006, 83” x 48” oil on canvas), captures Goodman’s sheer mastery of figure painting along with an enigmatic composition that hints at much more than you might want to consider. Is she the victim of violence? It doesn’t look that way. But what are those red splotches on the lower right? And is that a shadow of a man’s head?
In the Eakins tradition
Goodman’s use of photographic references goes back to Thomas Eakins. It’s in the Eakins tradition and it isn’t, depending what you do with the references. Goodman no longer needs to employ a model. Just as we know how to write our names in the dark, he knows how to draw and paint male and female bodies. Brushes, crayons and pencils are only the beginning, but they always capture a sense of the human spirit.
Goodman populates his work with family members, friends and passers-by, all of whom remain purely symbolic and this accounts for their timeless imagery. He paints Everyman, writ large. We furnish the biography. Therefore it can change from year to year.
Goodman’s work seems to be reaching a new level of expression. He has eliminated many of the extraneous touches that formerly bothered me and has achieved clarity of expression and technique that enhances everything. He has taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine arts since 1979, and his paintings hang in the permanent collections of major museums here in Philadelphia and at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Art Institute of Chicago and many others. He enjoys a well-deserved national recognition; Europe and Asia should follow.
Art Blog [November 20, 2006] ---------------------------------------------------------------
The Warm-Up for New Year
By Libby Rosof
The holiday season is just around the corner at Seraphin Gallery, with a float for Santa in the back room--Faten Kanaan's little hand-crafted sled--and a giant mummer's costume by Walter Benjamin Smith out front.
The sled is part of a group show in the back room, We'd Rather Not Tell You, a mix of work by gallery artists and others. (Our students at Tyler staged a show last week called Please Stop Talking, Please--pretty similar, huh)?
The front room has a solo show by Smith, The Transcendent Real, which, as Roberta mentioned here, continues his quest to break on through to the other side.
The surprise in We'd Rather Not... was Kanaan's sled, a handmade beauty inlaid with nacre (i.e. mother of pearl) and looking like it came straight out of some Russian folk tale. The sled, with its woolen fringes and Germanic name, however, brought up Joseph Beuys and Nazis and the stereotype of self-satisfied German burghers. So odd in its sweet perfection, so out of place in the middle of a gallery floor, the object gave me the creeps at the same time that it suggested a million strange stories of escape, trade routes, and bad values. I loved it.
Others in the back show include interwoven trees from Mauro Zamora, cut work from Sarah Daub and from Dee Nicholas, and work by Paul Laughney, Phoebe Adams and Joanne Grüne-Yanoff.
Smith's costume, with its eagle's head covered with feathers and it's 3-D rainbow crown of feathers and beads, is not so much mummers (ok, so I misled you) as shamanism--a giant kachina. And shamanism is what's behind his drawings and paintings filled with loopy imagery and mysterious narratives. The loopier, the better, although I confess a gag reflex to the Native American imagery and the appropriation of rainbows and crystals for visions of color and light. But then, the guy is appropriating everything, from Gauguin natives to cave paintings to space monkeys, and sometimes the mergers are really great and reach a pitch of incantatory transcendence.
What with missing two weeks--more like three--of looking at art, I find myself playing catch up, wandering around in Roberta's footsteps to see what I missed. Glad I got to see this work, which is up for another week.
The Philadelphia Weekly[November 8, 2006] -------------------------------------------------
Walter Benjamin Smith:"The Transcendent Real"
By Roberta Fallon
Walter Benjamin Smith believes in the redemptive power of the mystical experience. The young artist, having his first solo show at the Seraphin Gallery, says he's experienced mystical realms. And his new paintings, drawings and window installation gallop into the end zone in a celebration of peyote rituals, rainbows, crystals, animals and community. But what happened to the pop culture figures like yogi the bear that once cavorted in his pictures? "I've slowed myself down to tell the story," the artist says, explaining people were confused by the ambiguity they saw and couldn't tell if he was celebrating or attacking yogi and baby jesus (who appeared, memorably, in one work as a kind of slug). The new works have done away with ambiguity. In one after another painted snapshot of a hallucinatory state, the works praise the mystical experience as the way to a better world. It's the psychedelic Peace-able kingdom. Smith isn't a self-taught artist, but his works have the same heated spirituality and urgency to communicate as those self-taughts-Purvis Young, say-whose works evoke transcendence as a life goal.
Philadelphia Inquirer - Art [November 3, 2006] -------------------------------------------------
By Edith Newhall
James Fee, a Los Angeles-based photographer who died of cancer in September at the age of 58, spent his career capturing images that spoke poetically of things, people, and places that could not speak for themselves: a defunct shipyard, say, or a crumbling psychiatric ward, ancient tombs, or the overgrown South pacific island of Peleliu, where his father, as an American Marine, fought the Japanese in a horrific battle and was forever traumatized.
Fee's black-and-white photographs from the series "Isochrone," now in their last week at the Seraphin Gallery are grainier and more fleeting than much of his work-palm trees bending in the wind, the white foam of a wave flecking the air, a lone seabird scanning the ocean for a fish, trees as seen through a flurry of snow flakes. Looking at these images, which Fee shot between 2002 and 2004, one senses that he saw his own too-brief trajectory in nature.
Philadelphia Inquirer - Art [September 29, 2006] ----------------------------------------------------
By Edith Newhall
The Seraphin Gallery has taken to showing younger Philadelphia artists these days, and its two-person exhibition of paintings by Mauro Zaomra and Todd Keyser is one of the most successful undertakings to date.
Philosophically, Zamora and Keyser are on the wavelength. Both address the dystopian aspects of contemporary life, both use color to great advantage, and both have strong individual styles.
Zamora-whose audio-enhanced wall painting/mural of the El stop at Second and Spring Garden Streets was one of the cleverest works in the Philadelphia Art Alliance's "OutsideIN" exhibition this summer-is represented by 21 paintings, all subdued in mood, imagery and color. He calls hi half show "Border Crossing," and each painting depicts a literal or imagined transgression of man against nature. (Zamora does not paint human figures; man is represented by images of industry or technology encroaching on nature.)
I especially liked his creepy Problem Solvers, of a Louisiana lake engulfed by oil rigs, and his wall painting On the Way to the Rio Grande-inspired by the proposed fence along the Mexican border-that incorporates trash. The trash, it turns out is composed of Zamora's drawings.
Keyser's modestly scaled paintings are a quirky fusion of pop-art color and abstraction, and images of conjoined modernist architecture and asteroids. His placements of images and abstract gestures are so unusual that some of his paintings look as if they were cropped from larger works of his, although I doubt that's the case.
Like Zamora, Keyser has a talent for titles (his part of the show is "This is Not Your Father's Narrative"), and his paintings have such resonating names as Glam and Culture Brokers. But then, what would you expect from someone who mixes celestial bodies and ranch houses?
Philadelphia Weekly - Night Life/Art [September 27, 2006] --------------------------------------------------------------
By Roberta Fallon rfallon@philadelphiaweekly.com
In today's global art scene-where a Malaysian artist making abstract paintings in Brooklyn can show work in a Philadelphia gallery-it's hard to place value and pass judgment. Where one critical context was filtered through the narrow lens of theory or regionalism, now the lens is wide-angled. It must encompass the globe and embrace all venues and all theories. And why not? Everything is available at the click of a mouse, so why not look at and consider it all?
What stands out in this otherwise overwhelming flow of art is work that conveys passion and heat. I don't mean things that are merely loud or noisy or full of red. Passion in art conveys itself with energy, focus and humanity. Art by self-taught artists has this inner fueled heat which explains why art is now so popular.
Passion is a good yardstick for measuring art. Among work I've seen locally with this fire in the belly are Celeb Weintraub's paintings at Projects Gallery, the exhibition "Fables" at the ICA, Mauro Zamora's wall painting at Seraphin, and Mark Gilbert's paintings of facially deformed patients at Klein Art. This isn't an exhaustive list but reflects some thoughts about heat produced by a variety of artists in a variety of venues.
Weintraub's red-hot imagery depicts militant gun-toting babies and apocalyptic Candylands. You can feel the artist's distress about the subject matter. These works are Boschian dystopias full of beautifully executed details and surreal conceits. Their message about horror of excess keeps on coming. Mauro Zamora's wall painting of a border scene behind a cyclone fence-painted in delicate pink tones that suggest a dream, and with real paper drawings blown up against the painted fence like debris-is haunting and personal. What's expressed is the longing for beauty and brotherhood that is both simple and universal.
"Fables" is a hot grenade toss-fest. Works by Kara Walker, Christopher Myers, Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz and Kanishka Raja talk urgently about beauty, truth, lonleness and the human condition. Finally Mark Gilbert's portrait paintings generate heat by sheer depiction of forbidden territory-human deformity. The works are large and graphic, while essentially "applied" art (their goal is therapeutic for the patients and illustrative for the viewer), they make me think about why painting is better at communicating transgressive material than photography. (Compare say Lisa Yuskavage's cheesecake paintings with their source material, Playboy. Yuskavage raises ideas-and tittilates. Playboy just tittilates.) What Gilbert, like Yuskavage, brings to the table with his paintings (and interestingly, Yuskavage is also painting deformity.) is his humanity. And makes them worth seeing.
In art, as in most things, geniuses are few and far between. Mostly the art world contains hardworking artists, and what you see is a continuum from good to okay-with occasional zingers that fall off the chart at either end. We won't know our geniuses until our art historian grandchildren tell us who they are. Until then I'll keep looking for the heat and thinking about why it matters.
New York Times-Works on Paper Art Fair [February 5, 2006] -----------------------------------------------------------------
"Much of the pleasure of the show is in discovering outstanding single objects here and there. One of the most impressive works of contemporary art is a ghostly pale pencil drawing almost five feet square by Christopher Gallego that describes with intense realism and a delicate touch the artist's studio windows." [click here to visit article]
Dan's Paper.com [February 9, 2006] -----------------------------------------------------------------
It’s hard to imagine that this week’s cover artist, Jordan Wolfson, once studied pre-med at Yale University. It’s quite a jump from medicine to art although we do know some doctors who are also artists.
Even so, Mr. Wolfson decided to follow his “bliss” (as Joseph Campbell might say) and pursue a creative field instead. And let’s not forget, studying the sciences has helped Mr.Wolfson. As he puts it, “I have easy access to the analytical process as a result of my studying pre-med, and I’m also intuitive.”
Mr. Wolfson’s interior paintings prove that this combination of abilities works. Consider the room featured on the cover. There’s a strong “presence” here, one that could derive from the artist’s instinctual sense of being in that room, or even of someone else who had just been there.
Conversely, Mr. Wolfson’s “interplay between solid objects and space” establishes a dynamic suggesting a more concrete interpretation of what we see: perhaps this is where the artist’s analytical process plays a part.
Expressed another way, Mr. Wolfson is drawn to the “everyday environment, the mundane where there are no great announcements saying, ‘This is great.’” While he imbues his rooms with “naturalism,” their painterly style implies a richness that goes beyond reality, a sense that there is, in fact, “greatness” below the surface.
Helping to fuel this dichotomy is the narrative aspect of Mr. Wolfson’s work. There’s a sense that a plot is developing: we want to know who’s been in the room or who might be coming.
Regarding Mr. Wolfson’s professional life, there seems to be no such dichotomy. Once he decided to become an artist, his path seemed clear. Not that Mr. Wolfson didn’t experience diverse aesthetic experiences along the way: a residency in Provincetown; a ten-year sojourn in Israel where he discovered a sense of place and history and where his painting “matured.”
About that period, Mr. Wolfson has strong memories: “It was in Israel that I put things together. There was also such a strong sense of presence there, a density in the air, a charge. It was like dialoguing with the air.”
Asked what he might be doing five years from now, Mr. Wolfson imagined he’d still be painting his interiors (although he also likes to create landscapes and still lifes). He’d also like to visit India again and Brazil. Anyplace where he can commit the intuitive and analytical to canvas. [click here to visit article]
–Marion Wolberg Weiss
Philadelphia Weekly [December 28, 2005] - Roberta Fallon -----------------------------------
With works on paper ranging in date from the 1960s to yesterday, "Out of Line" at Seraphin Gallery is a great show. The gallery's forte is figurative works, and that's the glue that cements, for example, a brooding 1975 Sidney Goodman ballpoint pen landscape of a basketball court in the woods to a brooding 2002 Edgar Jerins charcoal-on-paper interior with dad and his disaffected boys. Phoebe Adams' three Field and Motion pieces are the most complex and intriguing works in the show. The artist starts with digital prints of microscopic images of a rock fragment (mica schist), adds a second layer of woodblock and stencil prints, and tops it off with abstract lines and shapes in pen and ink. The pieces are the primordial soup of the cosmos-and the cyber cosmos-and they're lovely. Also not to be missed is Walter Benjamin Smith II's virtuoso bird/man myth-maker. [click here to visit article]
City Paper [May 19th, 2004] - Robin Rice ---------------------------------------------------------
Seraphin Gallery explores the figurative tradition in Philadelphia and beyond.
As I sort through a toppling pile of accumulated press materials, I note a preponderance of summer exhibition cards depicting paintings of the human figure. Is this a resurgence of conservatism in response to our gradual national acceptance of a wartime mentality? Is it a cyclic cresting of Philly's legendary academic painting tradition -- perhaps linked in some mystic way to the 17-year cicada tsunami which will assault our eardrums this summer more intensely than ever before? Or is it my imagination?
No doubt the last guess is the correct one; however, my interest was piqued by "Masters and Mavericks" at Seraphin Gallery, which often features artists of the mid-20th century. I had not thought of Seraphin as a bastion of figurative art, yet Larry Rivers, represented in the current show by a pleasant, open figure composition, and Leon Golub, also showing a drawing, are favorites of gallery owner Tony Seraphin, who reminded me that he published the first book of Thomas Eakins' photographs, intimately linking Seraphin to the Pennsylvania Academy figurative.
Among the 34 artists in the show, Sidney Goodman stands out -- though not alone -- for quality and quantity. He's showing several studies. Among them, Figure with Caution Tape, a figure wrapped almost entirely in the distinctive yellow tape exemplifies one consistent strain of Goodman's work throughout his career, a conjunction of implied and static violence with representational and abstract rigor. A study of a Small Black Cloud, one of the minority of works in the show without a human figure, is marvelous. Goodman's recent large Two Self Portraits, in which a gesticulating, almost forbidding, contemporary self in the foreground overshadows a pensive child-self seated in the background, easily dominates one end of the gallery.
Seraphin's installation presents a sequence of effective juxtapositions which enhance the visitor's experience. A monumental charcoal self-portrait of the currently hot Susan Hauptman presents her self-analytic deadpan concentration above a carefully rendered lacy dress with a glitter-sprinkled corsage. In the foreground a dog turns from its baseball to eye us with hopeful sweetness. Vertically paired small paintings by Sandra Flood are linked to one another by a deep violet color. One work reiterates the dog motif on a violet ground. Above, in Five Months and Counting, a tired, pregnant woman droops in a violet kimono. Flood, who has several works in the show, has a deft, painterly way of depicting forms in light. Sharply edged shapes tend to be isolated against an artificially flat ground. They glow with a sweaty, frizzy-haired urban sheen and tasty color harmonies. Music and a frisson of feminist social commentary often creep into her work as subtexts.