Adam Goldstein has proposed to endow (or if you want to recover) the depth and transcendence of his painting in an ambitious metonymic operation from his work as a craftsman. His oil paintings preserve that material density that, through superimposed layers of paint, creates an interweaving of textures and chromatic effects that operate as a hint, a non-decodable hint that, in the absence of transcendent referents (a hereafter or beyond), can only operate on themselves. However, this exhibition, forged as a mise-en-scène, reveals to the viewer the referents from which Adam Goldstein nurtures his craft as an artist and artisan.

The self-referential oil paintings, both mute sign and matter for the beholder, transcend as a hint of a hereafter when they enter into relation with the terrariums, the wooded wand, and, of course, the lights (including here the digital projection of the firmament of the moor). The terrariums—encapsulations of living nature—constitute the artifice Adam chose to account for an intimate link with a nature that is not conceptual but lived as the founding experience of his creative process. This nature represented (sign and living object simultaneously) brings its own time as a condition of possibility. This time, as opposed to the chronological time the capital has crammed with strident lights, is the circadian time founded on complementary cycles of light and shadow.

It comes to mind, perhaps somewhat capriciously, how J. Tanizaki, in his well-known essay The Praise of the Shadow (1933), makes a plea in favor of the shadowy, the mysterious, the non-visible as essential conditions of a gaze and of an aesthetic tradition that has begun to crack under the influence of the modern European aesthetic paradigm, a paradigm defined by its craving for clarity, transparency, and objectivity. Through a mise en abyme of the chromatic sign, the exhibition seems to pretend to recover the shady and sacred territory of a meaning that can only be communicated as experience. In the visual oversaturation, which is also a saturation of light, Adam Goldstein has managed to save this anachronism through material artifice for his nature. However, alive and present is representation, thus configuring a meta-narrative for his work (a hereafter of painting). 

The eidôlon, which has lost its contours under the intense light of modern skepticism, restores its meaning and corporeality by representing a subjective experience that is also, as both art and craft, a work unto itself.

Excerpt from the text written
by Hildebrando Espitia