| Zeldis’ paintings are pictures of hope—the fecundated Harlem evenings, the beauty pageants. Who will find love tonight? Who will win? They are pictures by someone softening things for us, filing the burrs of reality off so that we can touch things again without thick gloves. In her work, there is the compassion of someone welcoming us back to the world. Even in bustling scenes with cars rounding corners on rotisseries of a charmingly botched perspective, the viewer is never forgotten. It’s easy to find a few souls looking your way.There is a transparency to Zeldis’ work that recalls the cross-sections of dollhouses popular with little girls. There is nothing voyeuristic, no secret angles. | 
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James Hilger
Malcah Zeldis: A Retrospective was on view at Andrew Edlin Gallery in New York In March.
Malcah Zeldis, Holocaust, 1984. Oil on canvas, 40 x 30 in. Courtesy of Andrew Edlin Gallery.Malcah Zeldis makes me dream about the opposite of economy. There is something in her work (in the wilder scenes in particular) that gently forgives any sparseness, ushers it off to search for sales, while she paints it all in—everything she wants for us with a generosity that can only be described as motherly.
Zeldis’ paintings are pictures of hope—the fecundated Harlem evenings, the beauty pageants. Who will find love tonight? Who will win? They are pictures by someone softening things for us, filing the burrs of reality off so that we can touch things again without thick gloves. In her work, there is the compassion of someone welcoming us back to the world. Even in bustling scenes with cars rounding corners on rotisseries of a charmingly botched perspective, the viewer is never forgotten. It’s easy to find a few souls looking your way.
There is a transparency to Zeldis’ work that recalls the cross-sections of dollhouses popular with little girls. There is nothing voyeuristic, no secret angles. We know all of the roles—what a trumpet sounds like, what “Budweiser” lit up in a window means, what a man in his Sunday best looks like. You find yourself looking through the windows in Malcah’s buildings without the fear of dark things, but simply asking which sister is braiding which sister’s hair tonight, and how many families are having lima beans as a side with dinner tonight.
Zeldis treats history with the same brush of familiarity—there is community, there is a collective memory between the subjects and humanity. The bombing of Hiroshima is rendered in the same paint as a Seder Table; Marilyn and Joe in the same color as corpses piled up outside a bunker in a concentration camp. Zeldis shows us how tall our heroes are, true, but even the horrid memories of history are rendered with a certain “Here it is, child. Remember and forget it. Now, go off and play under the sycamore trees”—because as thin as the glass is between her pictures and us, the real closeness is between Malcah Zeldis and us.
