“This is a place where words fail, they freeze in the throat before they can be spoken. It is still, secret, ancient, unchanging, dark (even in the day), visceral, uncultured, unenlightened, and magical.”
Aron Wiesenfeld knew he wanted to be an artist at the age of 12. From that early age he pursued a regimented schedule of drawing and painting for up to 6 hours a day. Out of high school he entered the Cooper Union School of Art in New York. He says “It was a phenomenal experience to be exposed to completely new ideas and be immersed in the art of the city”, but he was disappointed with the conceptual art emphasis of the curriculum there. “Talking about art seemed more important than making art, I thought it was very strange.” He left the school after 2 years.
Eventually enrolling at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Aron quickly found his way back to painting. “It was like learning that I could speak a foreign language” and he made fast leaps in large scale figurative oil painting. It was in school that Aron says he found his vision for his work. He was exposed to the work of many painters that would have a lasting effect on him, such as Lucian Freud, Odd Nerdrum, and Anselm Keifer.
However, Aron says it was the work of the German photographer August Sander that had the most profound influence. “When I saw his pictures, something clicked. Under the auspices of documenting the people of his time and place, he gave them titles that identified their ‘type’, such as ‘Farmer’s Daughter’ and ‘Dissident.’ At the same time the portraits were very intimate, portraying people at their most revealing.
Aron’s paintings depict enigmatic figures traversing desolate environments. Both the people and the places seem familiar, yet oddly out of place. He says “They are refugees, pilgrims, and wanderers, trying to get to the other side of a river that is forever out of reach. I think they are answering a call that is not consciously understandable, but resonates somewhere inside them. It draws them to a place they forgot that they knew about, something like a return to Eden.”
The settings of the works do not seem to depict specific places, but rather more archetypal landscapes. Of this he says, “The word I use is ‘North.’ This is a place where words fail, they freeze in the throat before they can be spoken. It is still, secret, ancient, unchanging, dark (even in the day), visceral, uncultured, unenlightened, and magical. It is the place where all myth is enacted. Yet there is also the intrusion of modernity: bridges and power lines cut through the organic natural forms.
It is the “in-between quality” of the places that appeal to me, which seem appropriate settings for the subject’s personal tragedies and rites of passage to play out.”
When asked about the open ended aspect of his images, Aron answers, “I just want to pose interesting questions. For the answers I rely on the compulsion of the mind to create dreams and fantasies, which will be as varied as the people who see them.”