The paintings of Jonathan Gold are without landmarks. These often barren and nearly abstract landscapes present a potentially post-narrative view of the earth, water and sky that lay somewhere just beyond our fickle borders and territories. In his painting “Untitled” (2005), it is the viewer who, rendered supine on his back, wakes groggily in near darkness only to find an outline of a group of shrouded figures looking down intently against a slightly starlit sky.

Gold’s paintings are situated somewhere between the sublime and the sublimated. There is allowed only a glimpse of light and figure in his often muted palette, the late aftermath of a flash from a camera. In his paintings, the figuration always seems as though our eyes have only just adjusted: a boy, a dog, a crashed plane. They are incongruous elements that seem to inhabit the same territory just as well. It is an area full of potential joy and dread. The boy and dog are not running for cover or chasing toward the crashed plane but upright, staid. The plane is not smoldering but inert. Gold’s paintings address unabashedly the everyday idleness and waiting of potential disaster, a longing for a normalcy that may never materialize.

This is the first solo exhibition of Jonathan Gold in New York. He was born in Kibbutz Afek, Israel in 1972. He graduated from the Rijksacademie in Amsterdam in 2004. His most recent exhibitions include Die Neuen Hebraer – 100 Jahre Kunst in Israel at the Martin-Gropius Bau, Berlin and Common Lodging at the Helene Rubinstein Pavilion for Contemporary Art, Tel-Aviv.