Martin Weinstein has painted interiors and exteriors in direct contact with his subjects over many years, since the 1980’s, carefully observing the changes of light, season, or time of day — impactful to his compositions.
The exhibition, and Impermanence here being both subject and object, is an exploration of the passage of time, both for the artist and his work.
This group of mainly paintings in various media, a selection of works ranging across more than forty years, explores the transition that work can engage in over time while keeping close to the core of both subject-matter and artistic viewpoint.
Weinstein, trained as an abstract artist, and formerly part of the Abstract-Minimalist movement in New York City, followed both heart and instinct, and made for the observer at that time, a most likely abrupt transition from an abstract painter to one who continues with conceptual representation.
Using a method of observing space and time in situ makes him a contemporary plein-air artist, as much as his observations of interiors, objects, and, at times subjects, connect him with artists such as Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard, and Félix Vallotton, who, at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th Century, experimented with space and its objects/subjects reconstructed and reconfigured.
There is an added Surrealist element in his works that show both interiors and exteriors layered, and interwoven, when Weinstein constructs spaces that have an inside-outside or outside-inside perspective inextricably interlaced, creating an unexpected and uncommon view of space, subjects, and all things depicted — a sensation and perspective of space and time, that reminds of M.C. Escher’s fantastical perspectives, or of some of the Surrealists’ Salvador Dali’s or Giorgio De Chirico’s compositions.
There’s also a kinship to J. M. W. Turner’s tradition of Romantic landscape painting. His landscapes are combinations of both, expressionist compositions with emphasized colors and virtuous movement, and translucent impressionist studies of minutes, hours, days, months, and years.
While some of Weinstein’s earlier works have an apparent flattened interior/exterior space perspective that might still come from painting minimalist abstraction, the later works, up to the present, reflect more an observation of space through the fluidity of time.
ESSAY: PRISKA JUSCHKA
The exhibition sheds light on Weinstein’s work that utilizes, both interior and exterior space to create a complex in-side-out or outside-in perspective — pushing the cognitive process beyond the familiar and into the unknown.
The transition from a less complex picture plane, still more intact in his earlier works, to complex compositions, painted with acrylic paint on layers of acrylic sheets in clear plexiglass boxes, allows Weinstein the successful transcription of the fluidity of the observed without losing the authenticity of the depicted in the process. This untraditional medium, with light flowing through it, both enables him to create space as we construct it from memory, rather than in real-time, and to recapture the events that unfold in realtime and are etched in our memory.
The word creare in original Latin means to bring forth while in late Middle English, the word create connotes to make out of nothing. Both apply and converge in a single work by Martin Weinstein. He succeeds in showing both, the sensation of a moment in time extrapolated from memory, and, simultaneously, the image, a constructed depiction of time past, in front of our eyes — out of nothing.
The passage of time, the very moment cannot be captured, nor can the individual experience of space be generalized — but, similar to the concept of a camera obscura, humans find ways to create tools that help them see and relate to the incomprehensible. By inventing and producing a medium that enables Weinstein to show what has been dormant, and allows the viewer to see what is inscribed in our memory, as well as the artist’s unique vision shared, he continues the lineage of Homo Faber = Man, the Maker (Latin), or in other words, of artists, who like Weinstein, became active producers of tools to share their vision with the world.
This exhibition shows Martin Weinstein’s decade-long, ongoing, and progressive investigation of time and space, and his dedication and endeavor to communicate what is equally truly personal and utmost universal — the way we experience and observe the continuous impermanence of the human condition.
PRISKA JUSCHKA DIRECTOR, LICHTUNDFIRE , NEW YORK CITY JANUARY 2025
ARTIST STATEMENT: MARTIN WEINSTEIN
The focus of my recent work has been to explore a combination of themes; Inside and outside and past and present. Spacetime has been my primary subject for quite a long time and it seemed to me that the concern with melding interior and exterior was a new development.
This past year has presented me with the task of moving studios. This has meant going through old work to decide what to keep, what to store, and what to destroy. I was intrigued to find the inside/outside conundrum resonating in my work as far back as forty years. Priska Juschka and I have decided to include some of these discoveries in this exhibition.
I want to thank Priska and Lichtundfire for this opportunity, and Susanna Ronner for her elegant design. I also want to thank Jen Dragon for her continuing support and Tereza Liska for her inspiration and love.
EVENINGS,
EVENINGS
