Over the last 25 years, Noah Erenberg has produced a vast body of work that surroundings on the California coastline, along with his extensive cultural intake.

Noah, who operates within the spectrum of autism, produces work in a variety of styles, each of which is distinctly his own. His portraits exude a feverish
vitality and assertive use of color; other paintings portray rural and urban scenes on the verge of collapsing gracefully into abstraction, registered with an expertly delineated color palette. These semi-abstractions are calm and contemplative; seemingly expressive of a yearning for serenity, they would not look out of place beside the work of such canonical painters as Marsden Hartley or Milton Avery. Noah’s text-based paintings and mixed-media drawings (often incorporating in which seemingly unrelated words and symbols slash across colorful surfaces with an unsettling but mesmerizing urgency.

In the drawing Picasso, words, names and numbers can be found scrawled over each other in a dizzying disorder that suggests a private lexicon that is not immediately clear to the viewer but which nevertheless possesses a strange and inviting power. Even more irrepressibly cluttered and coded is the text painting Beer, Beach, Bra, an SOS signal spattered on a smokescreen – a hectic homage to beach culture that includes references to several local colleges and social diseases. With Ship the artist deftly reins in his exuberance. A ship, such as those mysterious hulks that can be seen idling in the foggy distance along the California coast, appears amid monochromatic swaths of sea. Paint is applied with a strikingly intuitive elegance, evoking Franz Kline freed from the realm of abstraction.

These are provocative and visually compelling works that unavoidably create an impression.

Noah’s work has been exhibited at such bastions of visionary art as Barristers Gallery in New Orleans and Andrew Edlin Fine Art in New York. He has had solo shows in Los Angeles at the Richard Heller Gallery, and most recently at the Good Luck Gallery. He was part of the ‘Internal Guidance Systems’ international exhibit of Visionary Art that traveled to many galleries around the world, and his work is featured in the book ‘Drawing Autism’.

– John Tottenham