Jacqueline Gourevitch: Paintings 1965-2018

By William Corwin

In Jacqueline Gourevitch’s Cloud Painting #1 (1965), we are looking at a stocky rectangle of sky with blue, gray, and white patches of color traversing the canvas space at an angle tilting upwards towards the left: there is no horizon.  If we were outside, experiencing this, would we be craning our heads in order to catch this moment, or perhaps standing on a mountain, looking into a wide expanse? Gourevitch places the viewer in an odd position or extraordinary place in order to remove the land from the equation. In doing that she creates a very personal form of landscape indeed—she makes the viewer the land, responding to the object, which is the sky. Many of the painter’s series, simultaneous to the cloud paintings in this exhibition, also play with landscape from the top or from the bottom—views of terra firma from an airplane, or cities viewed from a skyscraper looking down, with minimal or no sky at all. Landscape without the duality of earth and sky becomes disembodied, and the forms we take for granted; trees, buildings, and rivers become diagrammatic. Cloud Painting #60, Homage to Mondrian’s Red Cloud (1971) offers a way into Gourevitch’s process—there is Mondrian’s The Red Cloud (1907), wherein the cloud rests slightly above a slightly-lower-than-center horizon, and depth is rendered bluntly, but is clearly there—and there is Gourevitch’s Cloud Painting #60, in which the cloud not only dominates, but challenges us. This is not merely from the subtraction of the land, Mondrian’s cloud is poignant but still a mass of brushy strokes; Gourevitch’s cloud twists and writhes, with jagged white edges firmly demarcating between red and intense blue, and it is trailed by dark gray, crimson, and black thunderheads.

The artist’s pursuit of destabilizing space and disorienting the viewer is finely honed in the cloud series.  Painting clouds is a common trope because it allows painters to render a realistic image that is amorphous and abstract; but Gourevitch then proceeds with an academic approach, toying with the many ways clouds can be portrayed. She folds them on to themselves, dissects them, and sections them, a process that spans sixty years. Gourevitch is a teacher as well, and there is a pleasantly didactic quality to the different iterations of clouds she includes in her repertoire and we do not feel we are being lectured (and we are in good company—Gourevitch’s other students include many distinguished painters such as Glen Ligon). Cloud Painting Diptych (Left) #79 & (Right) #84 (1973) aims to overwhelm: blue sky is reduced to a tiny fragment at the top center where the two panels abut, and we are compelled to lose our sense of perspective in the fluffy volume of the billowy cumulus. There is that delicious sense of expectation at that moment when we are on an airplane as it enters the clouds, and for some reason we expect to find ourselves in an alternate universe. It’s always just vapor, but still we hope. Cloud Painting #108 (1987) reduces strands of stringy cirrus clouds to a selection of lines, and intersects with other of the artist’s investigations into pattern and diagrammic form—we could just as easily be looking at a disambiguated wheat field, but the selection of grays and pale ochers give some indication of sky, not land.  Most affecting, for me, was Gourevitch’s ability to capture that rare moment when clouds seem to be too real for their own good, when they attain a surreal kind of materiality—because of the angle of the sun, the depth of shadows, and the size and position of the individual cotton balls, so that they appear to have a pattern and structure. In Cloud Painting #207 (2000) she captures this static formation that makes the viewer catch their breath, with an inscrutably geometric hierarchy of small definite forms hanging in space. But it is actually the impossibility of space on a flat canvas about which Gourevitch is reminding us. The newest painting in the exhibition, Cloud Painting #153 (2023–24), is a game of triggering us with colors: white is object, blue is absence, and gray means the object is receding into absence. Clouds are the perfect metaphor for painting, they have all the visual cues of presence and none of the physical.