Abstract painter Josh Goldberg and figurative painter Jamie Chase combine cool discipline with exploratory themes of energy, transcendence and the boundaries of space and form in FOREVER and FLOATING an exhibition of new paintings at Susan Street Fine Art Gallery.

Josh Goldberg’s large chromatic paintings work with forms in space.  His choice of forms and their placement create the tension and energy between them, holding together the structural balance of the visual surface.  The color flattens, gives the illusion of depth, and dissolves or unifies into atmosphere.  There is a keen delight in the contrast of tone, the simple and complex, the carefully rendered and gestural.  These elements – space, form, pattern, atmosphere and color – are pulled from the outer limits of the surface into a center of gravity or nucleus, fixed forever and floating.  Although the subject matter is the medium itself and its manifest forms, there is always a subtext of meaning informed by Goldberg’s lifelong interest in poetry and literature.

Jamie Chase’s deliberately ambiguous figures constantly seek new territory while remaining grounded in a philosophy of evolutionary consciousness.  Each piece refers to all the others that have gone before while addressing a new facet of his ongoing thought.  Chase works with the fundamentals of perception: the human experience, the personal environment, and the way the two interact with each other.  His figures, at times so abstract as to seem like columns of pure internal energy, are inseparable from their environments, which can also be seen as external fields of energy.  As a work of art, it is finished at some point, but as a thought, it is a gateway to others.  Always there remains a certain enigma that is never entirely resolved.