Artworks

THE CLEARING OR SAD TRIPPY SMILIES (2016)

Each of Weinberg’s paintings captures a moment filled in a decidedly nonlinear visual narrative. Hints and clues allude to the strange events that befall the mysterious characters without revealing their meaning. This narrative conceit is conceptually related to a particular strand of contemporary fiction, most prominently associated with Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, and Don DeLillo. Weinberg alludes to Pynchon directly by quoting Larry “Doc” Sportello of Inherent Vice: “Idiots Unlimited. First to Go, Last to Know.” The motto appears as a tattoo on the left arm of Weinberg’s character The Man Without Problems. On the right, he sports a cactus tattoo. Weinberg had the very same cactus motif inked into his arm. Aside from a passion for arcane references and a zany sense of humor, the artist shares an enthusiasm for packing his paintings with the
visual equivalent of Wallace’s extensive footnotes. Together, the paintings become a multilayered, looping, self-referential funhouse, neurotically devoted to the obscure quasi-logic of events that, amid much uncertainty, continue to unfold. Consider The Clearing or Sad Trippy Smilies (2015) a case in point: on a pastoral meadow complete with birches and dotted with yellow blooms, The Man Without Problems, his hair shorn close to the scalp, arms lined with signature tattoos, kneels on the ground, steadying a black-haired figure. He is missing his

right hand, though, which, were it not for the eerily glowing blue phantom limb in its place, might be a problem. With his left hand, he grabs the leg of a figure running off with hands raised in alarm. Meanwhile, the black-haired figure reclines like some saintly martyr, while an onlooker gives or takes a knife—the weapon that severed the hand? Littered with cards of a toothy, teary-eyed, long-tongued smiley face, the painting also features

a Pink Man, pointing and laughing at the strangely sacrificial scene while pulling off a mask that looks remarkably like The Man Without Problems.