In Jacqueline Gourevitch’s cloud paintings (they are titled as such and depict the same) in a new exhibition at the art gallery Storage in New York City, I feel like I’m looking at the visualized, materializing parallels of relationships of space, form, presence, and meaning that started and continue to move forward on the paintings’ other side, beyond me.
Grandeur mirrors itself into my fleeting present amid the artworks, which are dated all the way from the 1960s through 2018.
I feel a sense of unity across space and across time, embodied within straightforward action; I’m thinking of just looking up at the clouds actually out there above us at any given daylight or nighttime moment. In every such instance, I am, in some manner, the same person as myself from another juncture in space and time doing the same. The instinctual, subconscious, relational, and physical looking towards which these paintings point — we probably look at the clouds around us a lot more than we’re aware, so it’s realistic — becomes where the continuance of life happens.
Gourevitch finds harmony in the naturalistic and existential sprawl brought forward by her works. Though I get the distinct impression that what I’m seeing is part of a defining, creative process that extends dramatically outwards and onward, me just viewing a part of that process feels like, well, also a part of it.
You start to think, are we really irreconcilably different from the clouds and the natural processes that they themselves point towards? It’s the kind of wistful observation you’d hope would lead people to want to take care of the natural world, considering we’re all part of the same thing, together.
In the meantime, Gourevitch’s paintings lay out a one-on-one relationship with it. In a few of the pieces, it’s as though we’re looking at those celestial bodies in surprising close-up. Elsewhere, we see surrounding spatial environments that are imbued with the same kind of internal drive and grounding as the isolated cloud in the real-world sky. The background itself is also pushed forward.
The impressions of light I get across these captivating paintings feel themselves somehow physical, or at least internally weighted — as though the core of a lit moment in time, the internal essence of what’s natural but esoterically far-reaching, is here.
The artist finds the impression of form — the experience of it — alongside her specific observations of the cloud formations and features that drive her paintings. The relationships of color and space feel material and sensuous.
Story and definition become less about an arc and an explanation and more about just gazing. Simply looking into these images’ internal worlds feels so illuminating.
Every level of the imagery in these paintings remains similarly present in the sense of it all taking up felt space, though I think that in daily life we often take the surrounding sky — and the background and context for our lived experience that it offers — for granted.
Ultimately, instead of an object-focused paradigm, we’re left in these paintings with a less sequential, environmental one, and it’s entrancing. What I see in these paintings is distinctly visual and communicative, but rather than definition by way of scientific precision, it’s definition by way of connection and the knowledge of that connection holding it all together.
The thought, even as I’m made attentive to forces that feel distinctly outside of me and my personal sphere of understanding and action, feels reassuring. I don’t fully see what’s on the other side, but I know it’s there. The internal strength of the paintings, their synchrony and presence of purpose: it all points to that overarching connection.
In the environment laid down by these paintings, an inkling of the beyond is suddenly and unassumingly right in front of us.
We ourselves are not a totality or an indefinite expanse, but our physical presences and the physicalities we sense with them are part of a story, held together and given its weight through a collection of moments that, at one point, started for a first time and renews itself again and again.
In Gourevitch’s paintings, I feel like I’m looking at the continual beginning: the foundational, renewing newness that in every moment offers hope. I get a sense of the physical, viewable reality around us, and I also get a startlingly present impression of its living touch: the potential, imagination, ambition, and creation that accompany it.
This exhibition of Jacqueline Gourevitch at Storage, “Paintings 1965-2018,” continues through July 2. Thank you to the gallery, and best wishes to the artist.
