Dearest Earth, Darkest Skyby David Goldes

Dearest Earth, Darkest Sky, David Goldes’ second exhibition with Dreamsong, presents searing, deeply moving works on paper that reflect the artist’s engagement with ecological disasters, global conflicts and collective grief. Referencing photography and memory, Goldes renders haunting landscapes that viscerally capture social and environmental upheaval.

Compelled by global catastrophes to move in a new direction, Goldes largely departed from his recent Unpredictable Drawings to which the artist applied electricity and chemistry, embracing chance and risk. Goldes’ new works on paper are more akin to paintings, brushed with acrylic paints, graphite and molding paste on black gessoed paper. Using a spatula to terraform the paste into ridges and eddies which are then layered with graphite, the artist applies sparing burn marks and swaths of color as emphasis in his greyscale worlds.

Scarred and swirled, the craters and vortexes that pockmark the landscapes lie under eerie, undisturbed metallic skies. In Stain, an auroral curtain drapes over rocky, barren terrain bearing a seeping red wound of unknown origin. Smudges of acrid black smoke are suspended against a knife’s edge of silvery dawn in Under A Quiet Sky. Centered on horizon lines, the restrained palette and tactile dimensionality of this work evoke our planet’s most elemental building blocks – iron ore and limestone, soil and seawater. Extending into the cosmos in From Above and Comet Fragment Passing, extraterrestrial objects hurtle towards Earth.

Goldes’ landscapes carry both the memory and immediacy of natural and anthropogenic disasters, his mark-making alluding to uncertain futures. He began conceptualizing the work in the Winter of 2024, post-October 7th, at the outset of the war on Gaza, and the imagery is based on the artist’s recollections of the onslaught of catastrophic documentation that bombarded us daily through our phones, laptops and televisions. Embedded with signifiers of war and ecological cataclysm – smoke, craters, swelling seas – the work signifies the calamities of our 21st century world as a kind of genre. By isolating memories of photographs in placeless landscapes, the artist demonstrates how pervasive these events – wildfires, surface-to-air missiles, hurricanes – have become. Goldes, who studied molecular genetics at Harvard before transitioning to art, is particularly interested in how these images enter our memory, often permanently changing the structure of neurons in our brain.

Reminiscent of Anselm Kiefer’s excavation of Europe’s horrific and repressed 20th century historical memory, Goldes constructs a visual language that demonstrates how the precarity of our current world and its ceaseless documentation is imparting a new type of imagistic topography in our bodies and memories. Paradoxically, the works in Dearest Earth, Darkest Sky also hold an inner stillness indicative of both the resiliency of the land and the awe inspired by the calamities that afflict it. By embodying turmoil within the landscape’s contemplative expanse, Goldes invites sustained reflection on the ecological and political challenges we face. In The Sea Is, choppy waters rise nearly to the top of the composition, cascading back down into a central vortex. Above the ocean’s peaks, sunlight breaches a scrim of clouds. The threat – of drowning, disappearance, erasure – is there, and it is transfixing, carrying both the comfortable familiarity of memory and the unease of impending doom.