October 13, 2006
Featured Artist: Caleb Weintraub
by Andrea Gomez

How does a religious man, an artist, answer the world of corrupt commercialism he sees around him? There are many variables that the nurture/nature equation provides, but let's start with what we know to be not variable. If he's an artist, he knows, he has known since early cognizance, his means of expression. If he is a persistently working artist, he knows his voice. If he is a thoughtful man, he develops what he wants to say. The variables tinker with how he says it, with what energy, vehemence, retribution, etc.

Caleb Weintraub takes long looks around him. From his perspective he sees a world fashioned by the conflicting forces: rigid moral codes and manipulative commercialism; the forms of nature and the idiom of mankind slanted against our innate, original purposes.

And how does a religious man, Caleb Weintraub, answer the world of corrupt commercialism he sees around him? He asks the essential questions, and answers them not in the vocabulary of his own religious, moral system, but more poignantly, in the the corrupt, contemporaneous language present throughout the society surrounding him.

Weintraub, AND ALL OF THE SUDDEN,

THE STREETS WERE FILLED WITH CHERUBS AND UNCERTAINTY,

THE STARS FELL FROM THE SKY, THE GROUND BROKE UP BENEATH THEM

AND ALL OF THE WALLS COMPLAINED, acylic on canvas, 120×168 (triptych)

His paintings have the aesthetic of the Doris Lessing Pin Ball Company. (Don't worry, Ms. Lessing has not yet explored this mode of entertainment. She has, however, explored the world of graphic novel, and I only wish she had conferred with Mr. Weintraub first before proceeding.) I have on my list of ideas for my own work the Passover Haggadeh as a graphic novel, but as I gaze at Weintraub’s paintings I see in them echoes of medieval Judaica, manuscripts and ceremonial objects. He might be the better candidate for my idea.

He is a man of many words as his titles and explorations into rap confirm, but he has much more to say non-verbally. One reviewer suggested that he may have more to say in video, which Mr. Weintraub is also exploring, but for me that is a simplistic misunderstanding of his paintings. The fact that his aesthetic seemed “cartoonish” to that reviewer does not make them cartoons (or even cartoonish for that matter.) Mr. Weintraub is just lifting a visual vocabulary of one literature (cartoons) and touching it down appropriately if disconcertingly into the context of another (painting.) He prepares the way and melds the two into a cohesive tableau. It is almost the opposite of what Winsor McKay did back in the early 1900’s.


In a recent show, "…with the bathwater," (Projects Gallery, Philadelphia) the artist envisions a future world of babes in the throws of reaction. Reacting against what? In Mr. Weintraub's own words, from his artist's statement:

After generations of religious, governmental and corporate control of the population, a reactionary seed has taken root. In time this activity has devolved into an environment of indiscriminate justification, an era of excesses and extremes. Children are left without moral compass. The world they know is a world without consequences; they act accordingly, turning against parents, teachers and the adult world. After a period of catastrophe and destruction, they are faced with a new frontier, a new landscape, unrecognizable but possibly less bleak. They immediately put to practice the system they have grown to understand. A system of anti-rules. …. People who believe in truth of any kind are persecuted by the state. And the same impulses that have been responsible for the greatest social achievements of the west, perhaps of mankind, have left it void of meaning and potential.

Presently, Mr. Weintraub is work on a body of work that continues the childrens’ story. Again in his words:
… The new works are far less extreme than my early works; they are driven more by a sense of the magical, the fantastic, the unknowable. I can't say they lack a sense of foreboding but they certainly are not abject. In these works the children in this imagined future have already succeeded in ridding the world of its adult inhabitants along with an inherited body of anti-rules and anti-systems. The children are now faced with a litany of dilemmas ranging from making sure they do not become adults to living without the luxury of victims…Now there’s a phrase.

Mr. Weintraub was raised in New York, and attended school at BU and Penn. Presently he is teaching studio courses at University of Indiana.