Frenhofer discovers before the anxious Porbus and Poussin the painting of Catherine Lescault, a work to which the old Frenhofer says he has dedicated at least a decade and which - he thinks - should constitute his legacy, his final token of immortality. Nicolas Poussin, the famous classicist painter, uncertainly interrogates Porbus (Frans Pourbus the Younger) about his impressions: Porbus showcases to the young Poussin an identical strangeness; neither of the two sees anything.
—Do you see anything? –Poussin asked Porbus.
—No. And you?
—Nothing.
The two painters left the older man with his ecstasy and looked to see if the light, falling heavily like lead on the canvas he showed them, did not neutralize all the effects. They then examined the painting from the right, from the left, from the front, from below, and from above.
—"Yes, yes, it's a painting," Frenhofer told them, mistaking the purpose of that scrupulous examination. Look, here you have the frame, the easel, my paints, and my brushes.
He then took a brush that he offered them with a naive gesture.
—The old lansquenet is making fun of us, said Poussin, returning to the supposed painting. I only see colors confusingly mixed and contained by a multitude of absurd lines forming a rampart of paint.
—I believe we were wrong, replied Porbus.
The comment and the quote belong to Balzac's famous story “The Unknown Masterpiece,” is a story that I could not help but evoke when trying to explain to myself what Adam Goldstein's work arouses in the viewer through which it is possible to participate, first, through the certain perplexity before the pure and dense materiality of the canvas (perplexity prefigured by Balzac through Poussin and Porbus), therefore to, in a second term, give way to the gaze, the reflection, and the discovery.
In his oil paintings, Goldstein renounced line to concentrate on obtaining volumes, textures, and chromatic effects. However, behind these volumes, textures, and effects, there is something more: a second or third look reveals that within the material density of the paintings (twenty or thirty superimposed layers), certain senses accumulate of which we can barely notice a hint of, subtle signs or promises that the author has decided to hide from the indifferent or hasty viewer.
Returning to Balzac's story, the painting that confuses Poussin and Porbus' contains the revelation of an exquisite foot that seems to come to life in one of its corners.
— Approaching, they saw in the corner of the fabric the tip of a bare foot emerging from that chaos of colors, tones, and indecisive nuances, a kind of shapeless mist, but what a delicious foot, what a lively foot! They were petrified with admiration at that fragment that had escaped an incredible, slow, and progressive destruction. That foot appeared there like the torso of marble Venus from “Paros” emerging from the rubble of a burned city.
—There is a woman under here,— Porbus exclaimed, pointing out to Poussin the various layers of colors that the old painter had successively superimposed, believing he had perfected his painting.
Beneath the layers of colors in Adam Goldstein's paintings, visions of an inner world survive, like unexpected clues, subtle fragments of the identity of which we barely get vestiges; the translucent effects exposed to the viewer's gaze attempt to suggest this. In Goldstein's painting, I believe I can notice what Cezanne called “temperament,” the presence of a specific natural impulse, the existence of a stubborn, unintelligible force that converts the artist's incommunicable desire into a work of art.
If we wanted to use the well-known allegory of the cave (σπήλαιον), it could be stated that Goldstein attempts to make the work of art (reversing the direction of Platonic mimesis) a last refuge for the inaccessible ideal, protected as a symbol and secret beneath the successive and stubborn layers of paint. The inhabitant of the cave or grotto no longer walks among shadows but among frescoes that promise him a truth (or, in this case, a vision) that he can barely intuit through an intensive gaze.
