Cheryl Goldsleger: Points of Order, Points of View

Cheryl Goldsleger, in common with Uccello and other Renaissance masters, has always been enamored of that “bella cosa” perspective; more specifically, she has always been engrossed by the way shifts in perspective so radically alter our perception of relationships among objects, our perception of objects. Goldsleger is also fascinated by architecture, a fascination particularly evident in her drawings and paintings of the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. These works’ exquisitely rendered, tightly framed, labyrinthine plans suggest partial views of classical sites or anonymous urban complexes filled with structures that resemble amphitheaters, agoras, temples, offices. Not utopian visions, these invented, airless precincts, empty of life, function instead like memento mori, with intimations of transitions, absence, temporality and, ultimately, mortality. Their subtle spatial distortions (they are often presented in isometric perspective, from its overhead point of view), their architectural anomalies (arbitrarily placed upright slabs and columns, sunken shafts, abandoned chairs, rooms without windows, exits or entrances, ramps and stairways that lead nowhere), and their sense of isolation and silence, evoke, for example, Piranesi’s Carceri, de Chirico’s Mystery and Melancholy of a Street, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Kafka’s claustrophobic, premonitory surroundings, Borges’ surreal settings. Goldsleger’s sleight-of-hand is her ability to formulate images and spaces that are rational yet coexist and slide into the irrational, that pass geometric clarity yet dissolve into mannered complexity, into psychological forces.

By the mid-90’s Goldsleger began to compress her architectural renditions into mazes and labyrinths with their multiple associations and uses, ranging from the mythological and mystical to the diverting, to puzzles and games. This group of work was more diagrammatic, although the hard, brittle edge of geometry was tempered by material sensuality and by metaphor, quietly subverting their contained, measured semblance. Through the agency of impersonal geometry, Goldsleger arrives at the deeply idiosyncratic and urgent, an urgency that the eye reads, baffled and enticed as it follows the intricate, winding, angular lines of drawing, losing its way, finding it. In effect, all her work is a labyrinth, an involuted continuum of space-time, and vision is the golden thread that takes us to its heart, to its secret chamber, to the Minotaur – and back again. While Goldsleger describes her aesthetic formally, there adheres to all her work a sense of narrative; these precisely engraved squares, diamonds and triangles beg to be decoded and explained, like arcane symbols, arcane rituals, or the meaning of the mandalas or Minoan Linear B. Here, one secret may be, as other abstract artists have noted, that formalism at its core is mysterious, transgressive, a hybrid of reason and passion, not unlike the Minotaur.