Bruce Rubenstein’s “Portals†represent the culmination of over twenty-five years of dedicated art-making, the true epitome of an artist who has found his own unique voice. Throughout his career, Rubenstein has experimented with numerous modes of representation and fabrication, studying the work of his forerunners from ancient Egypt to the innovators of the late twentieth century, allowing their work to inform and influence his own methods, learning by example how best to express his own singular vision.
He cites the experience of viewing the exhibition of Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines as “life-changing†, but the influence of Rauschenberg and others (abstract impressionism, Tà pies, the Russian avant-garde, amongst others) has resulted less in slavish adherence to a particular aesthetic principal, than in a sense of empower
ment, an expansion of imagination and possibility – possibility as to what form an art work can take, and from what materials it can be assembled. The result of this experimentation, this inspiration from a variety of sources, has resulted in a body of mature work that represents a forceful artistic voice, instantly recognizable across the whole range of Rubenstein’s oeuvre; yet it is a voice which manifests itself through the unique and individual stories told by each unique, individual piece.
The title “Portals†was not chosen haphazardly: the centerpiece of this recent work is a series created around a suite of 100 year-old interior house doors, torn out and discarded, rescued and resurrected. The doors are a physical evocation of that quality in Rubenstein’s work that invites the viewer to step through these portals that
he has created, doorways each to their own self-contained story-world. But these places of imagination and inspiration are ones in which frame of mind and interpretation can vary as much from observer to observer as from piece to piece: from the size, shape and arrangement of the different elements comprising each assemblage, to the variety – and oftentimes mundanity – of the smallest components, each work proclaims its necessary uniqueness and its own distinct narrative space. Each tells its own tale, but none is oppressively emphatic about what that tale should be: as much as Rubenstein considers himself to be a storyteller through his art, his work contains enough abstraction and open-endedness to encourage the observer to take a full and active part in exploring the multiple meanings, echoes and inferences suggested by the harmonized disparities of each piece.
No subject, no material is off limits: beauty and meaning can be found in any place if one knows how to look. The keenness of the Rubenstein eye for the scree of the everyday should be no surprise, however, since it was trained in his hometown of New York, that city in which from an early age any resident must learn to find their own equilibrium with the intensified flotsam and jetsam of urban existence. For the past two decades, Rubenstein has been turning that eye to the land- and cityscapes of southern California, a perfect example of the adopted home seen more clearly from an outsider’s viewpoint. Born in 1955, Rubenstein grew up on the streets of Brooklyn, creating art wherever he could, finding inspiration in the crumbling walls and trash-strewn streets; he painted nocturnal murals on the sides of buildings and other public spaces, and soaked up the influence of the detritus of modern city living all around him, learning to find beauty in objects cast aside, ignored or derided. This early period of Rubenstein’s working life, when he was experimenting restlessly with form and style, fed back on itself in the form of one of his most remarkable experiments: a feature film script dramatizing his experiences as a young and struggling artist.
It was brought to the screen in 1995 as Bullet, starring Academy Award winners Mickey Rourke and Adrien Brody, both collectors of Rubenstein’s work. Brody played the young artist in search of his voice, struggling with his art and a hand-to-mouth existence, and with a pair of deeply troubled brothers, themselves struggling with drugs, the Mob and post-traumatic stress disorder. This was no glossy Hollywood feel-good growth story, but a depiction of the reality which informed Rubenstein’s education as an artist. It also stands as a perfect iteration of his belief that art must exist primarily as an emotional reaction to a moment in time, and that it must function as the encapsulation, transmission and perpetuation of that moment and that emotion: art as truly indivisible from real life.
For further information, please see documents and images hosted at: http://www.mediafire.com/?8g51bdo7o6jd0
Or contact the gallery at either c.lurie@mac.com or 1 (818) 762 1500
