ADAM WOLPERT: PAINTING SPACE
(at Look May 7 - June 5)

by Peter Frank

No, there isn't a name missing in the title. This is a one-person show. It is a one-person show of two (well, three) bodies of work, to be sure, and one of those bodies seems at first to have nothing to do with the other(s). But look more closely.

Adam Wolpert is first and foremost a painter. His interest in his subjects, such as they are, is driven by his interest in what paint can do and what he can do with paint. He paints trees, water, and immense, nebulous swirls all for the same reason: to coax light out of pigment.

This show is all about light and paint and the space–or spaces–they create by working together and inventing one another. Wolpert is a painter of places, but he doesn't always need a place to paint about. He can invent his own. And when he does, he roils an imaginary sky with whole storms of churning agitation, whole hurricanes' worth of cyclonic fury– and beautiful light at the end of these tunnel-like tempests, sunlight bursting through almost audibly. Wolpert does not profess to be painting the heavens in tumult, but he doesn't resist the meteorological– or theological– implications of his abstractions. He is, after all, a painter of space and light, like Monet, like Turner, like Constable, like Tiepolo, like Ruysdael, like Poussin....

And that's why Wolpert's literal landscapes, finally, seem of a piece with his abstractions, even though those landscapes not only show something else, but show it at a different scale and, yes, in a different light. His studies of trees, of woods, and of water leave less to the imagination than do his larger, more encompassing abstract canvases. But they impart even more complex moods. They capture the way nature, by bringing together a particular tree and a particular glow, provokes in us a simultaneous sense of elation, nostalgia, contentment, and longing. Wolpert is ever after that moment when you look out at an island or chance upon a place in the forest and want at once to be nowhere else and everywhere else.

The philosophers of the Enlightenment, with their theories about affect and sensibility, would have instantly recognized in Adam Wolpert's landscapes the allure of the Picturesque, and in his abstractions the thrill of the Sublime. We, the inheritors of these refined but sensitive observations, get the allure and the thrill, and get as well that Wolpert is some sort of magician with paint, with space, with light.