Alex Goldschwartz proposes a surprising cross between Pop and Baroque.

In dialogue with Geraldine Pinzón, curator of the exhibition held in Miami this year, the plastic artist reflects on his aesthetic obsessions and motivations. "I try to create a work that strikes beauty without giving up subtly hiding content," he says.

October 9, 2022

"As time goes by...the song remains the same", by Alex Goldschwartz

—What is your intention when creating art?

—The first is to turn into material (work) something that was a vision within me. My work is an expression of my interiority, of my unconscious and that I try to articulate through a conscious act. It is a path of self-knowledge insofar as it reveals hidden contents to the conscious that are manifested in flashes of images, which are visions that I have (sometimes). Other times they manifest themselves in chapters until they take definitive form on the canvas.

My intention is clearly communicative. My work, as you will realize, is a part of my cosmology, although not all of it. Reflect a thought. A conception of the world. I have no interest –for now– in discovering new forms of painting, in the sense that was sought in the avant-gardes of the last century, because I feel that it would be like pretending to invent new letters of the alphabet. No, I think that as an aesthetic, everything has been invented, and what I do is look for new formulas for combining the given elements. Something like searching for new poetic forms using the usual language, which seems to me to be an even greater challenge, since the risk of repeating elements of the past is enormous. However, it is my bet. And I think that, precisely, my originality lies in the complexity of the symbolic system of my work.

I am interested in maintaining the concept of “aura”, as Walter Benjamin conceived it, and achieving apparently conventional works that have a symbolic impact and that do not renounce creating beauty, but not looking for the decorative.

I try to create a work that strikes beauty without giving up that beauty subtly hides a content, generally paradoxical, that is intellectually and emotionally stimulating. I think my painting resists a linear and literal interpretation. It is not apparently clear what it suggests, but it hides a symbolic coherence in its content.

Alex Goldschwartz: "My work is an expression of my interiority, of my unconscious and that I try to articulate through a conscious act"

—That said, how would you define your line of work or your style?

—I don't quite believe the definitions of style. A provisional definition, not without humour, would be that it is a Postmo-Pop Neo-baroque. I have a strong admiration for Baroque painting, for the process of the 20th century avant-garde that somehow forced the conceptual to reach Pop, and perhaps despite myself, I can't help noticing that the mix I make of visual styles can be framed within what is called pastiche in the postmodern view, which is not a pejorative definition but rather evidences the heterogeneity of influences.

—What is the predominant message in your art?

“There is not a single message. My work is a great puzzle in which a personal symbolic system is put together, which, however, refers to the deconstruction and deciphering of the unconscious, insofar as this can be read as a process of liberation of inherited beliefs.

For me, an art that can be called true always has something unfinished, since it is a constant unfolding of one's own conscience and of a truth that never ends. I try to convey the process of building my conception of the world and of life, in which the spiritual is the development of consciousness, through love, beauty, and symbolic thought. Together those three elements. Attempt a triumph of Eros over Thanatos. And it is in this process that the established, the old, the falsified religious forms appear as a representation of the Thanatos against the creative, the new, the beautiful, which would be Eros.

Starting with modernity, we apparently live in a secular culture. However, we cannot ignore 1,700 years of ecclesiastical indoctrination. Whether we like it or not, we are completely imbued with biblical images and, what in my opinion is insane, is that in the midst of modernity we continue to consider biblical mythography as a historical account. In my opinion, this has devastating consequences on the poetic sense of humanity. Precisely in the Renaissance fixed ideas are questioned, but what I want to highlight is that in art only religious motifs cease to appear (of course always loaded with drama so that we do not forget the eternal guilt that we must pay) and begin to appear very Various motifs from Greek mythology.

Here we come to Boticcelli and the double reason for my choice to paint the birth of Venus over and over again. One is the simplicity of her beauty and hers – finally!

– exit from the dark Judeo-Christian world. The second reason is that I have long believed that the myth of the birth of Venus holds an important key, but that it falls short in the face of the variety and masculinity of Greek mythology in general.

Alex Goldschwartz: "A provisional definition, not without humor, would be that she is a Postmo-Pop Neo-baroque"

—The reiteration of the figure of Venus leads me to notice that there are other figures that appear in different situations in several of your paintings. What is the underlying idea?

—This is part of a project to form a kind of alphabet or visual grammar, as if those figures were equivalent to the words or ideas within a poem. In this case, they are images with which I try to articulate a visual and spatial discourse, which escapes the temptation of being interpreted as a linear discourse in words.

It is also part of this project to create a kind of new poetic mythology that allows us to approach or suggest the need to recover or interpret in a new way what would be a kind of mythical thought. The mythical is not separate from the Logos, but they complement each other. We succumb too soon to the temptation of rational thought, without understanding that behind all this fascination with science, with its supposed ability to explain the mysteries of the world, hides the same gaze that centuries before hoped to explain the world with religious discourse.

My criticism of organized religion is not a defense of rationalism or atheism, but I believe that organized religion is like the bureaucracy of true spirituality.

"Our Lady of Glamour, Protector of All Blondes" by Alex Goldschwartz

—Is this how religious elements should be understood in your works? That is, the nude nun or the other women who look like virgins or Greek goddesses.

—The naked nun refers to the title of the work Our Lady of Forbidden Desire, which is part of the series “Our Ladies of the Status Quo”, which in itself shows a paradox. They are idealized women but they collaborate with the status quo, that is, with the prevailing/conservative order.

The image of the nude nun from the waist down symbolizes a double message: on the one hand she exists as a sexually attractive being but at the same time her upper part – her conscience – is dressed in religious clothing, that is, concomitant with the status quo and mostly repressed. She can offer herself as a sexual being but her head, her mentality, is covered by religious clothes, because although she is not religious, the prevailing culture is tinged with religious elements.

That is to say, in this paradox the religious prohibition on women is expressed, the prohibition that she freely exercise her sexuality and her independence. She is born in splendor but is subjected to the prevailing order. That is why the painting has two versions: The Birth of Venus in the middle of the Inquisition and the second, Venus and the trial of Eva.

What is meant is the disagreement about the role of women for the Church and the indiscriminate repression exerted on dissident thought in general, especially during the Inquisition (it is important to refer to the true and original meaning of the word heretic, which simply it means "the one who thinks differently" and that has nothing sacrilegious about it, he simply exercises his right to think differently).

The Inquisition for me is the perfect metaphor of the oppression of the culture in which we live, since the Inquisition does not appear in 1478 in Spain, which is when the Spanish inquisition is founded, but it appears in Languedoc, France, around 1134 to repress libertarian forms of Christianity such as the Albigensians who curiously promoted free love (this topic is very well treated in Umberto Eco's novel The Name of the Rose).

It is interesting to note the parallelism between the current culture of cancellation in social networks and the inquisitorial gaze.

"Why is there a figure of Shiva holding God?" How should this be interpreted?

—This is part of what my conception of the universe is. At the origin of religions there is always an esoteric knowledge that is transmitted only to initiates. In the case of Christianity, the apostles were the initiates of a secret knowledge that Jesus, as a teacher, imparted. There is tons of literature on this, it is not my invention.

It should not be forgotten that religion itself is born with the death of the guide, because while the guide or teacher is alive what he transmits is a doctrine or knowledge. Religion is born to supplant the figure of the original teacher, who is always contrary to the prevailing forms of religion at the time. This means very clearly that my critical gaze does not go towards the figure of Jesus or towards his doctrine, but to the subsequent distortion of his word by the bureaucratic apparatus of the Church. And above all towards the concept of monotheism absolute, to the idea of ​​a single truth.

Alex Goldschwartz: "It is interesting to note the parallelism between the current culture of cancellation in social networks and the inquisitorial gaze"

—Do your works of art have offensive or sacrilegious elements?

"Neither offensive nor sacrilegious." In any case, my work is ironic and irreverent, but I would tell you that an art that is not irreverent and that does not question the established order is a purely decorative art.

You could only speak of something sacrilegious if you believed some sacred order to be true or if you were within it. And let's not forget that nobody was ever in contact with something (object) sacred. The sacred is a convention. People believe in sacred things because they were taught to do so and not because they have had direct experience with the sacred. It is something that refers to another moment in history in which there was not enough scientific and psychological knowledge. It is like thinking that the Pope of Rome is sacred, or sanctuaries where it is said that there is a piece of the cross of Christ. Obviously it is not. They are forms established by the Church to maintain the "fear of God" always present.

Religion, as an institution, was born to maintain social order. Every religion has a political background of maintaining the status quo and, above all, a conception of the world in which the Church or power are the highest repositories of their understanding, while the common people, who are taken as ignorant of the divine truths, must submit to the guidance of these powers, as sheep to the shepherd. I think, but I'm not sure, that what you mean is if there is an aggressive intention towards the prevailing religion in my work. Basically I am critical of the historical consequences of monotheism and the conversion of Christianity into the religion of the empire.

"Then let me ask you: who is God to you?"

God is not who, but what. If he is who, it is me, you, all humans, because we are all made of the same energy, which is the same energy of the higher plane that we talked about before.

It is the energy that forms the entire universe. So we are all God. Then you have to find another way to find the differences. And the differences are at the level of consciousness. Each level has its plane of energy and its plane of consciousness. In humans the four planes are one inside the other. The origin of the spiritual path is to reach the purest energy and the highest consciousness. But it is an interior and personal experience, and cannot be mediated by a Church or any religious authority. When this is the case there is always a manipulation of power. But I do not deny the reality of the spirit. What I mean is that organized religion dictates the rules of a spiritual quest that is fake, thus depriving people of having a true spiritual experience.

Contrary to what it seems, what I propose is to question the conception of the world of any established religion, in order to search (not necessarily find, because "many are called, but few are chosen"). What I demand is the end of the conception of life as a path of stones to have bliss in the afterlife. Because bliss, truth, love and God himself are here and now with me and there and now with you.

—What I love about your pieces is that they ask for a lot of participation from the viewer, the meaning is not explicit but they ask us to seek to understand. That in itself is an exercise. An intellectual exercise that contemporary art so lacks.

—Borges defines the aesthetic fact as “the imminence of a revelation that does not come to pass at all”. That is to say, the spectator perceives that he is seeing something in a language that he does not know but that he vaguely intuits without being able to define it precisely. It is in this emotional/intellectual effort, as if he were trying to piece together the content of a dream that he cannot quite remember upon waking, and that he feels that dream has revealing meaning. True art awakens and stimulates the desire to go beyond the obvious meaning. To decipher the symbolism.

(*) Geraldine Pinzón has a degree an Art History & studied Curatorial practice . She resides in Vancouver and has operated in galleries in Miami, Paris, and Vancouver. She currently serves as an Art Consultant of Contemporary/Modern Art.