Alejandro Goldberg acts in an autonomous and distinct area within the Israeli art field. His biography is one of a city with a deep impact on his painting — he was born and raised in Mexico City, which profoundly influenced him through its extensive murals and public art.

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In the exhibition "Fast Falling Angel," Goldberg presents two recent groups of works from the many series he has painted over the years. The series “Cry for Help, for Abstract” features paintings of very large scale, expressive, monochromatic, full of rage, created in the days following the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack. On one wall, a triptych of red paintings on white canvas with no organizing grid. On the adjacent wall, a triptych of raw black abstract violent paintings covers an organized grid.

The second group of paintings in the exhibition, "Children's Paintings," is a work of large scale, consisting of nine paintings, each composed of two panels. The diptychs that comprise the work are arranged in three rows, creating the appearance of a single body. The work is a polyptych wall installation featuring duplications, multiplications, separations and divisions. The installation as a whole and its parts as metonymies undermine painting’s unity and become a possibility that is both one and many.

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The large scale of the paintings and the themes of struggle and alienation will be read as deeply influenced by Mexican murals from the early 1920s to the 1950s, including works by Siqueiros, Orozco, Rivera, and others. These are the paintings that Goldberg saw and experienced as a child in Mexico City, and with them, the profound political potential they embody.

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The paintings that comprise the installation are based on Goldberg's children’s drawings. The small scale of the Children's Paintings contrasts with the Mexico City mural-influenced paintings. In the children’s drawings that have become his own, the medium of painting is at stake, for example, in the primal relation between sign and stain. The primal, by the infant, emerges in the paintings in its themes of the struggle between good and evil and in the recurring figures of angels (a Christian theme that stems from Goldberg’s biography). The child being also manifests in the monstrosity in Goldberg’s paintings: an animal figure baring its teeth, a clown or the image of Ronald McDonald, primal symbols like swastikas and handprints, and the inherent monstrosity of faces in the portraits (not unlike such appearances in the paintings of Israeli painter Ori Reisman).

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Adjacent to the exhibition hangs the painting that gives it its name, “Fast Falling Angel.” This large-scale painting is part of a group of spiritual paintings influenced by Christian imagery and by anthroposophical thought deeply rooted in hagiographies. These paintings embody devotion, somewhat boyish, an aspiration toward God, the divine city, and the cosmic divide between good and evil. Like the image of the circle of heavenly angels that Goldberg repeatedly unfolds on vast canvases, the painting serves as a journey toward unity, composed of an increasing number of parts. The painting “Fast Falling Angel,” though, shifts to the motif of the fall, joining in its horror the series “Cry for Help, for Abstract.” The heavenly and the supreme, which he depicts in an omnipotent innocent aspiration to encompass everything and perceive what lies beyond the visible, are torn in this painting. It features the faces of his children as two angels plummeting in terror to the earth, trailing a line extending from the celestial in their descent. The horror is tangled with the monstrous, a monstrosity that penetrates the visible in the realistic figurative portraits he mastered in his youth.

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"Observing light spots on the object or person inspires me to convey the essence of the person I am painting onto the canvas, even beyond what I see. I aim to transfer the internal element in the painting with as little contact with the canvas as possible. My focus is on the large stains of color, rather than marginal details. This approach, along with my consistent choice of realistic coloration, allows me to embody truth and honesty in my painting on a deeper level. I paint quickly, striving to capture on the canvas what I see with minimal time, mannerism, and movement. In the studio encounter with those I paint — mostly people close and familiar to me — there is a primary impulse, an initial reaction. I try to capture that fleeting moment on the canvas. Additionally, there is a certain distorted or monstrous element in the paintings; in the people and children, one can identify this distorted aspect. I don't like beautiful paintings. What is monstrous is, in a certain way, my feelings toward the person before me. Perhaps these demons are connected to me, and I identify or imagine them in the person before me and then embody them in my realistic figurative paintings."

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(In conversation with Yael Bergstein, January 2024)

1 – The consideration of painting’s unity appears in the images apparent in his Children’s Paintings, such as couplings of alien creatures, mirrored figures, against backgrounds of duplicated and divided triangles and quadrilaterals.

2 – See in this context Walter Benjamin’s essay “On Painting, or: Sign and Mark.”

3 – The figures of angels in Goldberg’s work, as an embodiment of what is not seen but sometimes revealed, stem from the autobiographical: experiences of revelations of angels or miraculous events, and common Mexican religious images he saw around him.