Art Review: The Ineffable Point | Glenn Goldberg’s For You at Chris Sharp Gallery

The work emits porousness, movement, time, and space through its repetition of the ordinary, offering the one who sees mutual listening or simple silence.

Walking into Glenn Goldberg’s show For You is like finding yourself tilted. The paintings hang like rugs that signify an alternative ground–a foundational plane that others the viewer’s perceptible space. Moving through the show, one discovers large vertical paintings, smaller cardboard drawings mounted on wooden panels, and washes of pink, orange, grey, or blue, along with the warp and weft of dots.

For You is an ode to a constant other. Looking at these paintings is like peering into someone’s kitchen, holding a knitted sweater, looking through a window, or counting the rings of a chopped tree trunk–an insight into the ordinary life of a different dimension. The painted specks stand witness to quiet, deliberate acts and patient, intentional choices attuning towards what is present, as if the dots participate in a simple progression that dissolves into an eternal sequence. Spending time in front of these paintings one recognizes an attentive value given to the repetition of dots, shapes, and time–the life of the object. And, like single-point meditation, these paintings invite the onlooker to do the same.

Those familiar with Glenn Goldberg’s work know that he repeats motifs resembling birds, dogs, ducks, bunnies, or a walking figure–the signifying names of these shapes which the artist persistently resists. For You is no different. While one might identify a “bird” motif throughout the gallery, the artist explicitly states, “There are no birds in my work.”¹

Like these “birds”, each of Glenn’s paintings offers a form through which one is invited to dissolve into what is in front of them, without given labels, preconceived knowledge, or second-hand assumptions. The work emits porousness, movement, time, and space through its repetition of the ordinary, offering the one who sees mutual listening or simple silence. And this feels kind. Like a dotted antidote that sieves the surplus of other more demanding dots, such as white noise and the monopoly of pixels on a screen.

A “desire path:”² wandering through Glenn Goldberg’s work is like treading the shortest and most easily navigated route toward a destination of stillness and guileless enchantment. If you attended opening night, it was also a “desire path” towards hot, fresh pupusas!

Idiosyncratic and intrinsically resistant, Glenn Goldberg’s show at Chris Sharp further underscores Sharp’s gift for hosting the inexpressibly wacky and acutely heart-breaking heft of “minor art”³ and an artist living in unassuming singularity.

For You is for you and for you.

1. Sharp, Chris. “Glenn Goldberg - For You.” CHRIS SHARP, n.d. https://www.chrissharpgallery.com/for-you

2. Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, s.v. “desire line,” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/desire%20line

3. Sharp, Chris. “Theory of the Minor”, Mousse Magazine, March 2, 2017, https://www.moussemagazine.it/magazine/theory-of-the-minor-chris-sharp-2017/