Jonathan Weinberg Moralist
by Vincent Scully
Despite the fact that many of Weinberg’s pictures involve urban settings in which sexual activity is encouraged, and sometimes shown, the paintings themselves are not those of a simple sensualist but of a complicated moralist, of someone whose eager view of his world is contradicted and constrained by the strictest of conceptual codes. As a result his paintings are not “pure”—in either the popular or the pictorial sense of the word. They are complex; they embrace physical sensation and deny it, or reconsider its character, pushing it back behind the dark iron bars of their geometric law, which is however always shifting its stance. That grid stands between us and the fiercely colored, warmly lighted, richly impastoed city of sensation that glows behind it at varying distances, sometimes tightly pressed up to it, at other times seeming farther away. Sometimes the barring function breaks down, and it turns into ladders that let us through to climb into the hot spaces behind it. Occasionally it shapes itself into frames that set off, as a child might do, the naughty words and the erotic scenes. But it normally sets up an expansive dance, or a wonderful visual struggle between its pierced front plane and the background it screens, which is often lighted from the other side like stained glass. At its best the effect is of one great dazzle. We are always made to feel the power of an abstract pictorial order in relation to the counter lure of the world as perceived, which here is the world of the city.
In a way, Weinberg’s are willfully difficult paintings, consciously serious. He believes that it is the duty of a modern painter to try to do difficult things. Until recently he did not show some of the work that an unprejudiced, perhaps naive, observer like myself might regard as among his best: his sun-drenched little acrylics, for example, and his big watercolors, generous in scale and monumentally constructed. For both these types, Weinberg’s motif is the beach, not the city. How fundamentally New Yorkish that seems, distinguishing between the dual environments of its artists’ lives, the beach where you relax, the city where all the tough stuff goes on. Weinberg seems determined to fight it out honorably at the toughest level, even though he has begun to condense his modes this year and some of the scenes behind the grid are of rosy Provincetown houses well out in space under a dark sky, facing a bright blue sea.
Vincent Scully New Haven, 1997