The poet Charles Simic wrote, “I’m in the business of translating what cannot be translated: being and its silence.” Writing to budding poets, he advised, “Don’t tell the readers what they already know about life.”
Haruki Murakami wrote, “The scene seemed somehow divorced from reality, although reality, he knew, could at times be terribly unreal.”
Aron Wiesenfeld has many favorite writers. He finds Simic’s poetry “very visual”, while Murakami’s “calming and peaceful world that I can feel, breath and touch” relaxes him at the end of a stressful day.
The Cabin, oil on canvas, 25 x 13"
Wiesenfeld’s paintings don’t tell us much. “I prefer to leave specifics to the viewer,” he says. “And that is a constant theme through my work—the ability to paint something to suggest something that isn’t shown.” The paintings invite us to enter into them, enter into the experience of the characters he paints, find the real in the unreal, the unseen in the seen.
The Last Night At The Fair, gouache on paper, 10 x 14"
“I work intuitively,” he says. “There are themes in my work but I don’t think about a theme per se when I’m working. I’m a spectator of my own work after the fact and discover that certain pieces fit into a theme.”
In his recent paintings being shown at EVOKE Contemporary in Santa Fe, New Mexico, October 30 to November 21, a common element is snow.
There is warm underpainting that sometimes pops through. The cold palette, with white snow modulated with cobalt, purples and greens, is more deliberate than intuitive, an exercise “in visual problem solving in terms of composition and graphics.”
The Wheel, oil on panel, 16 x 12"
Some paintings had been started earlier but didn’t work. He pulled them out and began adding the element of white snow. He says, “I wasn’t thinking about recording current events, but my wife pointed out that the snowy landscapes reflect the state of dormancy we went into at the start of the coronavirus pandemic—we retreated and were introspective.”
In his painting Toy Boat, a boy stands quietly, perhaps precariously, on the snowy bank of a body of water firmly holding onto a line attached to his toy boat—a line that has more length so he can let it float farther away. But, the rope has an end. He can can hold on until the end or he can let the boat go, floating off to new worlds. The boy’s state of being is adolescence—being and becoming. It is a period of the “end of innocence and reliance on others,” Wiesenfeld says, “the beginning of heading into the world and creating his own path.”
Toy Boat, oil on paper laid on panel, 9 x 13"
To put his paintings into words, though, is to diminish their inspiration and their experience and to disturb their world of silence. Simic writes of his own art, “Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.” —
EVOKE Contemporary
550 S. Guadalupe Street • Santa Fe, NM 87501
(505) 995-9902 • www.evokecontemporary.com
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