Jacqueline Gourevitch: The Realist Transcends

“When you see, the act of seeing has no form—what you see sometimes has form and sometimes doesn’t.
[…] The true thought seems to have no author.”
––Clarice Lispector, Água Viva

Underneath a painting on the right wall of Storage at 52 Walker Street is a piece of paper stapled to the edge of the bottom left corner: “#203 Bach,” Jacqueline Gourevitch shares that she thought the image moved similarly to his music. I want to ask if he was playing while she was painting, but I’m interrupted by a request to explain the piece. A girl asks when it was done. Gourevitch claims she doesn’t know, but when she guesses the year “2000,” she’s exactly right.

The work goes like this––as it is.

Gourevitch’s exhibition at artist and curator Onyedike Chuke’s sunny gallery in Tribeca spans work from 1965-2018. While the dates are as encompassing as a retrospective, the exhibition is solely dedicated to her work with clouds-as-subjects, a series that spans the length of her career and continues still. However, the show does not progress through time in quantifiable difference. It does not develop past its throughline. It’s all sky, a universal nature, regardless of history and outside of identity.

Cloud paintings marked the birth of Gourevitch as an artist. “Before then,” she says, “I was a child.” A student comes to the practice until they’re good enough to come to their own. As a student, she was oriented by the horizon line––a perspective mark. But rules are limits (and one should learn to break them). “I’m not obliged to paint the horizon,” the artist realized. “I can paint what I want.”

Her horizon began to drop as she got closer to her eye but it didn’t disappear. Just like another cloud, inside the work, one opens as another fades. As she’s emphasized, perspective changes just like the sky. She doesn’t have to paint the horizon because the observer decides where it lies.

There is something to be said about a first.

In this one, a single determining line cuts across the canvas. The divide is emblematic of what is illustrated in all of the paintings, not only between what’s classically identified above and below a horizon as land and sky, but also between light and dark, foreground and background, water and space. Oppositions adopt a dialectic in their interplay. Either/or––Cloud #1 contains a diagonal dash. Material moves within it, so long as the hand can capture its rhythm.

Prioritizing the surface and its physicality, this is painterly painting. As she’s said, the subject becomes the vehicle. Its water, after all––of course, it moves.

During her time as a professor, Gourevitch notoriously had her students sketch a model who walked around the room. To catch a butterfly like Nabokov, pin a body but let the wings flutter. There isn’t anything interesting about a flat surface, she also said, “it should have a life.”

A garden keeps growing even if gone unattended. Though sometimes, the artist takes a razor to the canvas if she believes it failed. Vines are cleared. The sun can again reach soil.

Gourevitch is commended for being detached. The Buddhists do advise to watch thoughts like passing clouds and she does not name them outside of a number. They are what they say they are. Self-referential, the painting knows itself to be a painting as a painting. There’s a doubling of the double because a pendulum always comes back the other way.

The material is aware of itself as such. Bits of canvas are often left untouched and exposed. Paint seeks to complement more than cover. There is no attempt at a tromp l’œil, only a depiction as it is. Gourevitch is not a reporter, but she is a sublime documenter.

The cloud painting isn’t trying to be a cloud. It isn’t even trying to be a painting. It simply is. This is figurative abstraction. This is abstract figuration. It goes either way. It goes both ways.

An avid museum-goer, when asked about what draws her to certain pieces, she expresses her disregard for history or context, only caring for what the image says as an image. This approach to looking is mirrored in her practice. Her inhale is like her exhale––clear. Looking is also a kind of breathing.

I spent a few hours with Gourevitch in her Tribeca studio. In our conversation, I made a statement from what I’d call my critical philosophy: “Nothing is what it is, only what it is to you.” Gourevitch immediately refuted my claim: “No, I don’t think so.” She said a phrase in German: “Das an sich”—she’s referencing a piece of Immanuel Kant’s philosophy—“the thing-in-itself.”

In a discussion with Glenn Ligon, one of her former students at Wesleyan University, at Storage he jokes about the hardest question for an abstract painter: “What is the work about?” Another laugh. This is not the case for her, they both agree. Gourevitch doesn’t paint what she feels, she paints what she sees.

With eyes closed and hands conducting, she mimics the action. “I wasn’t painting thinking, ‘oh this is abstract expressionism.’” There is a model in her mind. She does not try to paint a signifier, but its sign.

Abstraction and representation, why make a distinction when one will always look for something familiar? There’s a man in the moon, after all.

In a talk with her son, also held in conjunction with the show, writer Philip Gourevitch, she was asked about her being a refugee, having fled over mountains by foot and an ocean by boat with her mother as a child to escape the war in France. The question sought to perhaps provoke a response that might tie experience and identity to the work. She was blasé. It was “just another adventure,” she said. Fleeing war was (and is) such a common experience, “it wasn’t anything unique.”

Gourevitch provided a similar shrug when asked about being a woman. She went as far as to deny opportunities to show in curations whose point was to only include women. She isn’t “a woman-painter,” because she’s just “a painter.”

But it is a privilege to be indifferent about identity. And it’s conflicting. The image exists in its environment just as she exists as a woman. One must historicize. She knew that Cloud #203 was painted in the year 2000, even if she didn’t realize it.

I consider Beauford Delaney’s current show at The Drawing Center on Wooster St., which consists of many portraits, self-portraits, cityscapes, and abstractions––to categorically delineate with names. Ask Beauford what he saw in the mirror. Ask him what he heard in his head. He’s shown it. He’s told it.

I also consider an artist like Philip Guston, who abandoned abstraction in a return to figuration. Look at that shoe and tell me you’ve seen one like it on someone’s feet. There’s a dragon in the sky. I just see wings. Color is drawn by a brush between lines. A word is an image, too.

An artist fascinates because of how they see and then translate the world through a lens unique to themselves. The time between observation and documentation is the space where the artist implements their self in order to reconstruct––even if it’s just a second between a glance at the model and the canvas (or a year between a trip to Crete and New York, as Ligon revisits Jack Whitten’s search for color).

Memory moves. A cloud changes as soon as it’s seen.

In the studio, I confess my feelings of inadequacy in terms of my age. Confined to my physical being, there’s a miscommunication between who I am and who I feel I am. Gourevitch looked at me with a kindness that only comes from a special kind of seeing. “You’re just who you are.”

Maybe this is that third ineffable thing: Truth. Bounce back and forth enough and you’re buzzing.

I spent three hours with the artist and a pot of black tea three hours before my flight to Paris I booked on a whim. Unlike Gourevitch, I am not a painter, but on my flight home a week later, I sat in my window seat and drew. I have not looked at clouds the same way since seeing hers. From what I’ve heard, I’m not the only one. And is this not what the artist is supposed to do? How exactly does one propose a new way of seeing?

“I just keep on painting,” Gourevitch says––simply.

Jacqueline Gourevitch Paintings 1965 – 2018 has been extended through August 1^st, 2025 at Storage. 52 Walker Street, 4th Floor, Tribeca, New York 10013.

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