The Brooklyn Rail

In Gerald Wartofsky’s show at James Fuentes, the dreamed up worlds of music and literature mediate violent realities about generational grief. The paintings are airy and metaphorical, allusive yet withholding. Drawing on the Kabbalah, Gustav Mahler, post-War literature, and a range of painterly influences—from Rembrandt to Chaim Soutine—the artist murmurs soft mysticisms that occasionally turn toward the unsettling. His first solo show in New York, Wartofsky’s The Song of the Earth is a darkening reverie of abstract biblical allegory, romantic drama, and intimate disclosure.

As one turns into the exhibition, paintings from the series “Karin’s Garden” greet viewers with bleary idylls. In Karin’s Garden IV (1998), Wartofsky remembers his late wife Karin in her garden, entangled in pink and yellow flowers, her face disappeared in a hazy afternoon remembrance. Nature, memory, childhood, all prosaic tropes of an innocent pastoralism, sometimes push these works into the realm of arcadian cliché. Yet, Wartofsky withholds some of that genre’s idealism, and the series becomes enigmatic enough to evade the redundant springtime naiveté typical of verdant tableaus.

Other works in The Song of the Earth expose the garden’s gloomy underbelly. The New York-born son of Jewish immigrants, who fled Eastern Europe’s pogroms, Wartofsky unfolds this history as a secondhand witness to these events. Perception is transmitted through familial stories of escape and narratives that survived the destruction of World War II. One painting, On Curzio Malaparte’s ‘La Pelle’: Holocaust (1976–78), the titular Italian war reporter’s 1949 novel La Pelle details harrowing Nazi crimes that, here, Wartofsky depicts with de Goyan horror. Portraying a chapter in which “the novel’s narrator is drawn by a strong wind into a forest and discovers men strung from the trees, many of them Jews,” bodies both bloody and numerous hang as described, refracting this viscerally terrifying encounter through Wartofsky’s nightmarish imagination.

In The Doll Peter (1968), Wartofsky’s ominous surrealism takes the form of a creepy baby doll. Compared to its mottled and misshapen body, its head is alarmingly alive with a small upward looking expression that animates an otherwise artificial and wispy little creature. In another doll study, Floating Dolls (1969), two toys meld into one ghostly being. Wartofsky’s smudged images can be fascinating studies in the grotesque quotidian, such as Hanging Fowl (1997), the burnt orange conjuring a poultry market from hell.

While Wartofsky does emphasize the uncanny in, at times, provincial subjects, he also expresses an appreciation for the touching mysteries of life in exultant works like Karin and the Carousel Horse I (1981) and Evocation of the Letter Shin II (1993). Wartofsky accomplishes these more lighthearted moments without giving into sentimentality, maintaining the present absence of recollection. Even produce and flowers, as in Garlic Stalks (1993) or Proteus (1996), respectively, become enchanted objects, divorced from the plane of mundanity, shot into unreal vitality. In domestic scenes, he invokes the loose cubist experiments of Paul Klee in The Prague Clock I (1990) where a room that appears to be a nursery dissolves into geometric abstraction on the left, while a clock on the right is frozen on Hebrew letters.

At James Fuentes, The Song of the Earth is a dour tune, filled with the strange familiarity that accompanies religiously tinted fantasy and inherited trauma. Wartofsky composes worlds that contain a gentle sense of dismay, a gradually poisoning beauty, where nothing ever feels quite right—but when has it ever?