greekart

Tuesday, July 26, 2005

Poetry to Painting: Peter Golfinopoulos

Charms: Recent Paintings, Walter Randel Gallery, New York, through July 30.

By Jonathan Goodman

Peter Golfinopoulos is a highly skilled painter whose art has taken many forms, from highly articulate abstract expressionist works painted during the late 1960s and early 1970s to his recent show at Walter Randel Gallery, in which the abstractions form rhythmic patterns that are given punctuation by thin vertical stripes that hover over them. For a thoughtful and well-educated artist such as Golfinopoulos—he spent 16 years at Columbia University, both as a student and instructor—art’s influences are given a boost by such philosophers as Heidegger and Sartre, whose existentialist ideas made an impact that the visual language of art could not supply. In fact, the current show of rough-edged patches of color owes its public-minded effectiveness to the literary inspiration of Paul Valéry; the title of the show, “Charms,” comes from the French poet, whose prose piece, “Recollections,” articulates his interest in having poetry become “a way of cutting myself off from the ‘world,’” the world in this case meaning “the whole complex of incidents, demands, compulsions, solicitations, of every kind and degree of urgency, which overtake the mind without offering it any illumination, move it only to disturb, and shift it away from the more important toward the less.”

Abstract painting like Golfinopoulos’s works from the 1960s and 1970s presuppose a connection between the interior life of the mind and the outward face of the canvas, which records the history of the artist’s self as it engages the exterior world. Golfinopoulos’s art is close to that of the abstract expressionists that preceded him, but it also maintains a literary tone that is related not so much to raw experience as the pleasures of reading. He is a very cultured man, with extensive exposure to texts in both literature and philosophy that have sustained his efforts to construct an internal world, the likes of which reference the overarching structure of modernism, whose often schematic abstraction Golfinopoulos embraced as an artist. His mostly blue paintings of the mid-1970s explore the realm of abstraction much as a diver explores the sea; there is an interest in depth, in the complexity of upwelling shapes that seem to reach the surface of the painting in a facsimile of oceanic forms. But despite the seeming marinelike nature of these works, it can also be said that they are invigorated with a feeling for culture, a respect for subtlety that takes the viewer past the painting itself and into the general language of culture, whose meaning moves beyond the specificities of one medium to embrace an awareness of art that links itself to words as well as paint.

An awareness of the relationship of words to art goes back at least as far as the classical period; Horace coined the tag, “As in painting, so in poetry.” In the art of Golfinopoulos, we sense an idiom joined to a perception of culture that includes the works of poets, art historians, and philosophers; his is a cultivated sensibility that distills different influences into an overall praxis of painting. This leads to a depth of experience, that is, a meaningfulness that asserts itself as much by implication as by viewing raw form and color alone. While it is nearly impossible to detail the influence of words on an abstract painting, we can at the same time commit ourselves to a logic in which language constructs an ambience dependent on an overall gestalt that includes the magical nature of poetry, or the abundant truth of philosophy. Whatever the source of inspiration, it is finally the meeting-point between words and images that the artist Golfinopoulos is concerned with; their kinship combines two very different media in a relationship whose closeness is extraordinary—a reflection of shared goals and mutually inclusive identities.

Interestingly, Golfinopoulos’s art has changed considerably over time: the New York school abstractions of more than 30 years ago served their purpose, and the artist no longer follows that style. Instead, he has substituted it with what can nearly be called pattern painting, given the regularity with which he renders abstract patches of form and thin bars, both straight and slightly wavy, in square compositions. These works seem relatively serene in comparison to the earlier art, which conjures up a mysterious, somewhat complicated response on the part of the viewer. Here, in the recent work, form is declared form with a minimum of trouble or fuss; the images seem to express a mature sensibility, in which repetition confirms a disciplined, slightly distant response to the abstract vocabulary of art. With Valéry as his master, Golfinopoulos conspicuously addresses a vernacular that references almost a rational, as compared to intuitive, regard for the processes involved in constructing a composition. In one work (all the pieces are untitled), dating to December 2003, the viewer sees reddish purple patches roughly aligned in horizontal rows; straight and slightly squiggly lines, all of them more or less verticals, are painted over the often sharp-edged shapes that are painted on top of a ground of sky blue.

This painting is a culmination of several decades of work, without which Golfinopoulos would seem decorative or too rhythmically simple. The reddish-purple shapes are more or less equivalent in the amount of volume they take up, while the thin lines—of light blue, dark blue, and red—create connections and combinations that defy easy explanation; one remembers the Valéry text that serves as a muse for this group of paintings, in which the poet seeks “to outlaw the arbitrary: to shut out accidents, politics, the chaos of events, and the fluctuations of fashion.” Just as Valéry relies on the spiritual truth of the poem alone, so Golfinopoulos maintains a steady cadence that refers to the imagination before all else, without which we could only construe the visible world. As a painting, this work possesses the self-sufficiency to refer only to itself: the flatness with which the patches of color are painted is schematic in its simplicity. One has the sense that, like Valéry, who “fashioned…a poetry devoid of hope,” the artist Golfinopoulos has also constructed a vision that is itself its own reality, without which his language would not be enough to fill the canvas.

For a writer such as myself, Golfinopoulos’s paintings succeed not because of their form alone, but because of a depth suggested by the artist’s relation to words. Rather than paint words themselves on the canvas, he involves an unseen idiom that gives a context to these relentlessly abstract compositions. Words are brilliant at mediating the ideas in art, but they are not easily made interesting visually, with the exception of the relatively minor medium of calligraphy. We only know of Valéry’s influence because the artist has told us of it; can it be said that the organization of form complies with the ideas of the poet’s text? While these queries are fascinating, they are, at the same time, moot in the sense that words form an invisible matrix in which the paintings are made. This invisibility is powerful only if we know intellectually that the words are there, hidden in the craft of the artifact’s making. One thinks of great works of literature, such as Paradise Lost, in which the influence of other literary pieces is easily traceable; often, Milton’s nods to Latin and Greek take the form of direct appropriation. But painting is unable to divulge the effects of wide reading, without which it seems that Golfinopoulos would lose inspiration. As a result, we can neither take it for granted nor ignore those literary elements that mean so much to the artist; because the paintings are so good, so specifically realized, we accept the slightly idiosyncratic conditions of their construction, silently reading not only the image but the words behind it.