Praz Delavallade, Los Angeles, 2023
Cole Sternberg, by reason of the high hills 2023
COLE STERNBERG : A TRANSPARENT WALL inside WORDS AND IMAGES
by Rosanna Albertini
Invisible as it is, the wall is a solid presence for the mind: almost a physical separation between the silence that comes before the word, or the painting, and the silence that follows, as if reality were a continuous, fluid volume that needs to recuperate the previous order after an accident, an interruption.
Cole Sternberg paints and writes, separately. The written artwork is a book with all the letters he wrote to Gerhard Richter, in Germany, every day of a certain year. Mostly his response to mundane or contingent aspects of life. A unilateral disclosure from a human to another. No doors opened in the wall of silence between him and Richter, no answer ever came. The letters were on display framed one by one on the walls of the gallery. Time on paper becomes tangible, a fragile relic, a surviver from an earlier time washed by the rain of life.
TITLE “to bridge the gap in their bark”
TITLE “easily carried away on a breath of wind”
The invisible wall —a ghost of my own mind inspired by Jabès— is inside each word, and the soul of each painting. The artist feels it, and lets each painting accept the unique destiny of englobing his personal time, or the dream of it: at times an explosion, or a gentle erasure. Every brush stroke, the way of revisiting images — memorials, remembrances, souvenirs, underneath the surface becomes secretly unstable, precarious like anybody’s life. Every day, every action centered in each person changes at every second, until death brings the final point. We are won over by the living process. So is art, at least for Sternberg.
Paintings reveal only one of the infinite moments of their inevitable disappearance; they exist as human artifacts and, patiently inanimate, they convey the human curse we modulate since birth. Time, human time is surrounded by limits. Even the power of nature so much revered by this artist has to bow to the instant that becomes image: layers of time fill the painting, along with Cole’s feelings all around the invisible wall. Like a Titan punished by gods, the wall absorbs and retains the anxiety of vanishing stories.
TITLE “brambles prevent detours of the beaten path” being transformed by sheds of water… or fragments of sky eager to meet the earth. The ideal wall an invisible obstacle against which things fall apart. The artist first. He listens to silence before and silence after. Zillion times, endless, hard to tell why something comes to life. Maybe it’s easier to say how it happens.
TITLE “they enclose all into pastures” a long title kept open to unknown prodromes or effects, doesn’t intrude into the painting that is a magic sposalizio (marriage) of branches, trees and fog, dense and limpid like a piece of music. It goes with Bellini’s opera La Sonnanbula very well. “Ah, non giunge uman pensiero” Human thoughts cannot get there. But perception goes inside, through an endless depth, gets lost.
from the letters to Richter
“ When your goal is naps, the world is your oyster.” CS
“Sandwiches never let you down.” CS
“I would like to dream of flying, water and sandwiches paradises. As you know, these are my favorite things.” CS
I wonder if this is a way for Cole to emphasize art’s and life’s different intrinsic nature, the force of a human organism whose survival is intertwined with small things, eating sleeping and drinking, birds pecking at seeds in the grass, humans looking for dreams to lift their feet and clear their mind. Art is one more physical presence, yet, it/she/he doesn’t change. It is perhaps the space where the vague, undetermined melted and regenerated realities, taking shape in the artist brain, find their home. And invite us to join them.
TITLE “in central europe, there are no longer any true old-grown forests” the title as well is a line cut out from a longer story that remains untold. Different merging eras, refusing to obey the linear phantasy of time, losing transparency, centered in a dark thickness surrounded by white ghosts of animals, or snowy rocks, or frozen ponds, whatever one sees in them. “What we think is never what we see.” Wallace Stevens
From the letters to Richter
“It is amazing how sometimes the words match the visual. How the beat keeps steady with cuts of verbiage and colors. My amazement in this fact was discovered while living in another world today piecing together a puzzle. Matching tone and tones, matching pauses and space. CS
Yesterday relates directly to today, just a little south. CS
TITLE “vertebrates” painted, creatures as humans, fish, frogs, horses, snakes, chickens and others reveal the colors of imaginary spines helping our and their chest to be the sounding board for daily stories. Thoughts about them are stuck in the forest of neurons, or recombined by synapsis, whereas the chest and the rest of the body have different ways of reacting and reveal them, painted on the skin by miriads of signs spots scars… the natural display of one’s living written with no words. Cole the artist goes beyond the skin: sameness is an illusion. Chemical alterations give to the inside of our bodies the same kind of uncontrolled visual proliferations we find on the skin. They both move incessantly, until life feeds them.
The artist doesn’t give up: what he sees is never what he thinks.
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