In the 80´s, Jack Goldstein´s photorealist paintings of lightning storms and other luminous phenomena made an indelible impression. Goldstein made copies from photographs and got images of spectacular and ephemeral events, usually against night skies. The final untitled paintings became some of the most provocatively beautiful of their time, a period when beauty itself was seen as a sign of patriarchal repression.
At the end of that decade, Goldstein left photography as a source to switch it for ccomputer-generated images and some critics misinterpreted them as Neo-Geo abstractions… though now these works could seem a prediction of our era of surveillance, Google earth and digital scans.
Disappointed, out of money and addicted to heroin, the Canadian-born and Californian conceptual artist and painter quicked the art scene to fade away in a trailer on the outskirts of Los Angeles, where he would kill himself in 2003.
Goldstein spent his late years working on the 17 photocopied volumes of his Selected writings (2002), a strange collection of sentences copied from philosophy he avidly read backward. Written in multiple tongues and evoking “the 10000 Jack Goldsteins” -name of this retrospective exhibition at the Jewish Museum NY until September 29-, Goldstein thought of it to mean his autobiography.
If Goldstein affirmed that there were 10000 Jack Goldsteins in any phone book, he´s been the only one to leave his footprints on modern art