Artaud, weary of Breton and Surrealism, fled to Mexico in 1936. Artaud desperately longed for something real: he had devoted his tormented, opium-addled life to the search for something that would finally redeem him from the sins of the European petty bourgeoisie. So, he resolves to flee the metropolis in pursuit of that “cosmic race” promised by Vasconcelos, in pursuit of men who will be different because he has sensed them to be real, organic, whole; not yet degenerated by the illusion of progress: the Tarahumara Indians and their entheogenic mysteries of peyote. Artaud flees to Chihuahua because he needs to “stop the world,” or at least his world, before despair and eschatological visions ultimately drive him to halt the world violently and definitively.

Carlos Castaneda, lacking Artaud’s cathartic pathos and more akin to the kind of petty-bourgeois liberal bureaucrat that Artaud could not stand, fled Los Angeles in 1960 for the Sonoran Desert— northwest of Chihuahua—to study indigenous herbalism; there he establishes his famous character, the sorcerer Don Juan, a man of peyote and knowledge. Castaneda, true to his training as an anthropologist, composes, around the Arizona sorcerer, the chronicles of a religious initiation (a magical initiation).

Don Juan explains to the chronicler Castaneda, as part of his initiation, that to truly know something, one must finally see, and to see, one must stop the world—and how does one stop the world? Don Juan is emphatic on this point: through non-doing.

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This exhibition by Adam Goldstein seeks to engage with this series of stages or initiation gestures not only through concept but also through a material process. Beyond the obvious characterization of the work as a snapshot (a capture of a moment) and a testament to a demiurgic will (to make), Adam Goldstein has sought to incorporate a kind of “not doing” as both a method and a totalizing concept, allowing the emergence of chromatic effects and textures that might unintentionally resemble clouds, ponds, and meadows.

As night fell, I arrived at one of those villages dominated by phalluses—those phalluses covered in figures that seem to have been planted there by some natural whim. Someone—I don’t know who—was whistling the melody of a Tarahumara dance with five high-pitched notes that suddenly plunged into a hundred abysses, and, as if a voice from the ravine were answering, a child approached us, all alone, naked beneath his gray blanket and with his face literally eaten away by pus. A sort of greenish mesh over the brow bone seemed to replace the course of a vein. He eagerly ate the food offered to him, though always keeping a prudent distance. I had thought I noticed a red triangle on the front of the blanket, its tip pointing upward, and when he turned around I saw on his back a teardrop, an enormous embroidered teardrop that spanned its entire height; its tip pointed upward and curved to the left. I immediately shrugged at the image that came to mind. I made a conscious effort to restrain my imagination, which is always prone to wander; nevertheless, I cannot say that I did not think of the image that presented itself to me at that moment, and I will mention it again, with the caveat that you may shrug just as I did. I thought of God’s FIAT LUX and of the way Robert Fludd, in his Theater of Eternal Wisdom, depicts the original movement of creation. That tear, that curved bubble, represents the light that, emerging from the void, gradually curves inward and closes in on the darkness it is about to replace. The teardrop, on its own, was perhaps nothing, but the red teardrop within the red triangle was already a rather singular approximation. Several weeks passed up there. I penetrated deep into the mountains; I saw the scattered priests of Peyote who grind the mixture of the first principles on their graters for entire nights. And I took the road back

In his correspondence, Artaud describes how the colors and patterns adorning the blankets of the malnourished and wary Tarahumara indigenous people seem to be vestiges of a rich symbolic culture in which colors—those primary, powerful signifiers—appeared to regain some of their former symbolic power. Adam Goldstein seeks to reclaim some of this symbolic capacity of color through the introduction of initiatory practices that reconnect humanity to a world—or a nature—that is assumed, by necessity and choice, to be mysterious, elusive, and ineffable. The symbol requires mystery to become operative.

It is clear to me that Adam Goldstein’s last two exhibitions seem to be delineating a manifest direction regarding a series of targeted ontological and formal inquiries—concerns that are integral to the artistic process itself—toward a certain spiritualization of technique, just as the blessed Simone Weil prescribed. Precisely this initiatory non-doing would be comparable to Simone Weil’s concepts of uncreation and void, by reviving Catholic negative theology (initiatory knowledge), was finally able to see. These oil paintings by Adam Goldstein aim to serve as an incitement and a pretext to, perhaps, halt a world that seems to promote only a purposeless acceleration—an acceleration that increasingly appears more resistant and alien to life itself. Ultimately, it is about something as obvious as stopping the world to pay attention and finally see