Alejandro Goldberg (b. 1967, Mexico City) has been working in Jerusalem since he arrived in Israel in 1999. He studied art at the University of Texas in Austin, practiced in Bulgaria and England, and then in Israel, where he attended Israel Hershberg’s Jerusalem Studio School. In his first solo exhibition at 3246, Goldberg presents works from the last two years.

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Goldberg’s painting is automatic. It relies on a very short time span between decision: theme, composition, idea, tone, and action: laying paint or drawing on the canvas. Even during the action, he operates quickly from the beginning of the drawing to its end. The work constructs itself while avoiding any previous definitions related to art history or the status of the painting, in the range between childish and childlike.

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In the exhibition ‘Fast Falling Angel’, two new series that were painted in a short time frame are on show. The first, ‘The Children’ series, relies on drawings and sketches made by Goldberg’s two adult sons, which he collected throughout the years. Nine canvases are divided in two, and seem like magnified versions of basic A4 papers. Even with the enlargement, the transition into oil paint and canvases, markings of professional painting, Goldberg preserves his sons’ innocent, direct, primal spirit of painting. An imaginary infantile, wild, humorous, and even violent world appears with a slight change: on a near-transparent background that organizes and anchors the paintings as an action of an adult who touches – whether as an attempt to recreate the time he spent drawing as a child, or as a young father – with an intimate intention that skips above a conscious and meddling representation. This series functions as an act of pleasure, but also as a memory board.

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In the series ‘Cry For Help, For Abstract’ are six large canvases, painted in red and black after the initial events of October 7th. Goldberg worked with a single tone for each painting, and began, as in ‘The Children’ series, by laying a light layer as a base, then working intuitively over it: smearing, squeezing, dragging, beating. What seems like a youthful gust of wind in ‘The Children’ series suddenly becomes a combative / victimized gaze of an adult man.

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Both the series reference American Abstract Expressionism, and establish a cluster, maybe a small, closed circuit between children’s drawings and a (male) gaze, in the context of a distraught soul that is expressed through an action of painting. It seems that these later works of Goldberg’s efface the stylized and periodic element forced upon us by the history of art, and allow us an observation that does not depend on anything.

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The choices Goldberg makes in the two series, stretching the format to large scale and creating a delicate substrate of paint as a basis for the artistic act, are two subtle, minimal actions that mark a field of action that differs from the random, and place Goldberg’s work in a realm of art and its exhibition. A mere step from the world of childhood. Iron and blood.