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Lot Essay
Approaching Walter Goldfarb's work demands at once that the commentary be situated in a intermittent play between the holiness of creation and critical reflection.
It all begins with a hindrance. Such classifications as style and theme, form and content. Goldfarb's painting ranges from the divorce between Jewish and Christian religions to the bredth of terms like 'national pride' and 'intolerance.' His action is circumscribed in Hebrew writing and the transmission of his parent's history. From another viewpoint, turning recent Germanic past into mythology leads to an analogy with Anselm Kiefer's work. This recollection must be faced with mixed images of both German Romanticism and the Nazi Regime. Such an allusion, far from being aesthetical, happens essentially through the constitution of an identity awareness. Even without the somber character and the facture of the German painter's canvases, there is a latent correspondence in the monumental scale and the handling of fire on the canvas. But whereas namelessness in Kiefer's work received an exuberant treatment (Nuremberg, 1982), in the Brazilian artist's a costly dominion arises from the impersonality of absence, a painting of scarcity, a drawing more than a pictorial mass.
One sees from this observation that the work can only transmit something on the edge. Deliberately deprived of its time-honored preparation, raw canvas is submitted to various procedures and materials, such as those repeated immersions in bleach. The delay in the process serves as a replacement to thousands of words, a preliminary gesture to circumvent the inadequacy of language before the insulting demolition of man (Primo Levi). Each little known translates in its perseverance the anguish that finds no echo. Urgency and expressive will are self-controlled in large though minute paintings, the glorified fragments of a shattered totality. The images borrowed from biblical iconography keep wondering whether the existence of the Shoah is a retroaction the the detriment of God's existence or, as many contemporary thinkers formulate, how much it belongs today to the conscience of the whole world.
An exerpt from Paintings and Ethics, by Lisette Lagnado
In The King and the Shoemaker, Walter Goldfarb appropriates a polycrom illumination from the Dresden Sachsenspiegel manuscript, 1210-1235, the most historic vernacular of German jurisprudence which spilled beyond its borders to influence the laws of Prussia, Silesia, Polonia, Ucrania, Ungri e Boemia; created through embroidering with threads of silver and fire, a rereading of an image illustrating the power of the Kings over their citizens and the relations between the citizens of diverse origins and creeds. Goldfarb uses shoes as a symbol of power, of mourning and social status.
It all begins with a hindrance. Such classifications as style and theme, form and content. Goldfarb's painting ranges from the divorce between Jewish and Christian religions to the bredth of terms like 'national pride' and 'intolerance.' His action is circumscribed in Hebrew writing and the transmission of his parent's history. From another viewpoint, turning recent Germanic past into mythology leads to an analogy with Anselm Kiefer's work. This recollection must be faced with mixed images of both German Romanticism and the Nazi Regime. Such an allusion, far from being aesthetical, happens essentially through the constitution of an identity awareness. Even without the somber character and the facture of the German painter's canvases, there is a latent correspondence in the monumental scale and the handling of fire on the canvas. But whereas namelessness in Kiefer's work received an exuberant treatment (Nuremberg, 1982), in the Brazilian artist's a costly dominion arises from the impersonality of absence, a painting of scarcity, a drawing more than a pictorial mass.
One sees from this observation that the work can only transmit something on the edge. Deliberately deprived of its time-honored preparation, raw canvas is submitted to various procedures and materials, such as those repeated immersions in bleach. The delay in the process serves as a replacement to thousands of words, a preliminary gesture to circumvent the inadequacy of language before the insulting demolition of man (Primo Levi). Each little known translates in its perseverance the anguish that finds no echo. Urgency and expressive will are self-controlled in large though minute paintings, the glorified fragments of a shattered totality. The images borrowed from biblical iconography keep wondering whether the existence of the Shoah is a retroaction the the detriment of God's existence or, as many contemporary thinkers formulate, how much it belongs today to the conscience of the whole world.
An exerpt from Paintings and Ethics, by Lisette Lagnado
In The King and the Shoemaker, Walter Goldfarb appropriates a polycrom illumination from the Dresden Sachsenspiegel manuscript, 1210-1235, the most historic vernacular of German jurisprudence which spilled beyond its borders to influence the laws of Prussia, Silesia, Polonia, Ucrania, Ungri e Boemia; created through embroidering with threads of silver and fire, a rereading of an image illustrating the power of the Kings over their citizens and the relations between the citizens of diverse origins and creeds. Goldfarb uses shoes as a symbol of power, of mourning and social status.