About

Tom Goldenberg standing in front of painting

Artist Statement

In my most recent work, I use abstraction to reference an architectural or fictive space. Although a traditional picture-frame is utilized, I envision the work as an inner proscenium that operates on several planes. There are burial chambers and areas of ritual sacrifice, walls and rooms as well as windows and doorways, areas above and below ground, and deep and shallow spaces for the living and the buried. The paintings function as elegies or heroic, intimate poems intuiting the history of man and “the structures of everyday life”—the title of a book by Fernand Braudel that is rhythmically poetic in his discussion of how humanity is orchestrated by geography, climate, technology and the routines of daily life.

 I see the paintings as documents of time passing, the ruins of structures no longer visible and the transitory nature of existence. Within the architectures depicted, in some of the works, there are references to other paintings that are an influence, such as Josef Albers series “Homage to the Square”. The powerful sway of history and the ontological argument of the state of being is sealed within these imagined and real schematic depictions.

CV

PRESS

WIKIPEDIA