Gabriel J. Shuldiner: The Poetry of Black Raphy Sarkissian / /
“Can there be a more hypnotic colour than black?” is a question that impulsively arises when we encounter a work by Gabriel J. Shuldiner, who has been unceasingly employing this achromatic colour in his unconventional paintings for the past decade and a half. Indeed, the evocative paintings of Shuldiner can be read as relief sculptures, where surface and space are in arresting dialogue. In many instances, the flatness of the painting’s surface has been entirely disrupted and reformulated through chaotic forms that emphatically protrude and recede. In other instances, the quadrilateral frame has been thoroughly contravened through formlessness. Often, both frame and surface have been rendered shapeless, as if to implode the inadequate lexical term “black” and majestically transcend its semantic value through ever-changing achromatic phenomena revealed upon iridescent, cambered bodies mounted on walls.