The paintings in James Gold’s solo show, Infinite Scroll, act as intermediaries between past, present and future. These glimmering grids at Morgan Lehman gallery toggle between his deep reverence for history and his active aesthetic imagination. Talking with the painter about his wider practices in collaged artist books and archeological renderings revealed new means of perception and applications of art-making.
Will Kaplan: The work of Infinite Scroll seems to concern time. Tell me about their lifespan, from ideation to execution?
James Gold: I usually have maybe five to ten paintings in progress at any time, and I jump between them. Some of these took, maybe eight, nine months. Sometimes it’ll be a little faster. Like Mosaic/Tapestry was pretty fast, maybe a couple weeks, because that was the last one I made before the show. I wanted something that ties it all together. I definitely have some clear plans for paintings, but then also let things change as they go along. Some of them will start off as drawings, or the drawing will be one element. Oftentimes a vision enters my mind, and I wonder, how would that look as a painting? I won’t know until I make it. That’s a lot of the excitement of wanting to create these things. A lot of them do have an artifact feel to them, even though none of them are actually real artifacts that are out there in the world. They are invented.
When making my collage books, on the other hand, I have thousands of little scraps. I’m always pawing through these bins of second hand books, which are filtering through my mind.
WK: I understand you quote from historical and craft diagrams, are those a frequent starting point?
JG: Not always, but I do enjoy the crossover from a technical diagram to a painting. I’ve done work in an archaeological dig, where they want very diagrammatic drawings. I had to capture the surface texture and the contours of these artifacts. I wound up thinking of it as a map of the surface. So I think a lot about maps, diagrams, cross-sections. They’ll take a photo of an archaeological site and then impose a grid on top of it: gridding out each segment of a pit. That’s an overlay of the creative over the reality, or a diagram of a reality.
So I go from these references of very simple drawings, and then envision: what if they were interacting with colorful mosaics? I am drawn to the imagery of both tapestries and mosaics, even though I don’t really make them. But this work lets me make a mosaic with paint, make a tapestry with paint. I like the freedom of making these things a little bit between a tapestry and a mosaic. It becomes this mysterious material that doesn’t or can’t exist in the real world necessarily. It’s sort of hard but soft at the same time.
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Read the full interview at artspiel.org
