between transparency and the invisible - shapes floating weightless upon a grainy surface

untitled, gertrude goldschmidt, 1970

untitled, gertrude goldschmidt, 1963

untitled, gertrude goldschmidt, 1970

untitled, gertrude goldschmidt, 1970

untitled, gertrude goldschmidt, 1963

untitled, gertrude goldschmidt, 1961

untitled, gertrude goldschmidt, 1961

Untitled (Tamarind 961), gertrude goldschmidt, 1963

untitled, gertrude goldschmidt, 1970

untitled, gertrude goldschmidt, 1963

untitled, gertrude goldschmidt, 1966

for more images and information on gertrude goldschmidt, see
gego - obra completa 1955-1990, caracas 2003

breaking away from the dead center (point), we make our first move (line). after a short while, a pause to draw breath (broken line or, after several pauses, articulated line). a backward glance to see how far we have come (counter-movement). weigh the pros and cons of paths in several directions (cluster of lines).
....
painters used to depict things actually visible on earth, things they liked to look at or would have liked to see. now that we know how very relative visible things are, we can voice the conviction that, with respect to the cosmos as a whole, the things we actually see are only isolated phenomena and are outnumbered by other, latent realities. so things are expanded and multiplied in their implications, often in seeming contradiction to the rational experience of yesterday.

quoted texts by paul klee found in klee, editions d'art albert skira, 1972 edition


i believed in the infinite seriality of time, in a growing and reeling net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. that entanglement of times growing near, growing out, intersecting or secularly ignoring themselves, embraces all possibilities.

jorge luis borges, the garden of forking paths, 1941


it is something invisible (yet happens in broad daylight when there is apparently nothing to conceal it except the light itself, blinding perhaps), something suspended (that is, both 'in suspense' - stopping, waiting with bated breath so as to disturb nothing of a precious equilibrium - and 'floating' - gently rising and falling in one place like a seamark following the swell of the waters); above all, it is something which creates a sense of distance, punctuates space; and it seems that this distance, far from being painful, is bracing and fulfilling. at times this occurs in several points of space at once and evokes a mesh in which you would gladly be ensnared, or spindly poles supporting the tent of the air, each tip raising it up a little (a massif of weightless mountains); or again a group of fountains, the transparent columns of a ruin with no roof but the infinite sky: at times it occurs in sequence, at irregular intervals immediately followed by silence reaching to the very depths of things, like a row of windows opened up in turn onto morning in the big family house...

philippe jaccottet, landscapes with absent figures, 1979


(title taken from texts in flyer for the 2005 gertrude goldschmidt exhibition at the museum of fine arts, houston)