Guy Goldstein -

Goldstein’s drawings depict various, at times unclear and unusual relations between humans and animals. The found, online images arise from many inexplicable situations; from pets to hunted animals, projected or implied animals, dead or alive. These variably awkward moments are coherently reproduced with different degrees of detailing, either light on a black background or sketched lines on white ground. All the pieces are drawn on lightly patterned paper meant as “educational devices”; children are encouraged to color these geometric patterns freely, detecting shapes, figures or repetitions within them independently.

The series makes use of the opposition between its subject and ground: The images are clearly “adult”, often including disturbing relations between man and animal, which are not all appropriate for children: hunting, chasing, threat, fraternity, domestication, eating and even sexual relations. The black-and-white spectrum negates the usually cheerful results of such coloring sheets, and of course, the artist completely ignores the pattern, drawing according to his own motivations and not according to any “rules”. In the context of Goldstein’s work, a lack of operating “rules” is unusual – even if they are only there to be disrupted – and an opportunity to look for other guiding lines, not the geometric given ones, but other rules of conduct the artist develops as a working strategy. In this case, the order to “color inside the lines” is replaced by another motivation: collecting materials from the online sphere and ordering them into a series. The “net” of the patterned grid is superimposed with images from the online network, with certain connections, but the whole image of the “network” and its interconnecting lines is much too vast to portray. The series inevitably connects, in our perception, to form a sort of story, a collection of wild, mysterious elements out of context, which conjure imaginary stories reminiscent of a network, not a linear story.