STEWART OKSENHOM
Artist Moves From Abstraction to Representation and Back Again.
Forces and elements that seem to be tugging from opposite ends count for much in the work of Ross Bleckner. The background of his canvases tend to be in dark shades of blues and blacks, but objects and abstract images often burst out of that darkness in brilliant light. When Bleckner is finished with one series of works, he tends to move to an opposing perspective for his next series. Throughout much of his career, there seems to have been a struggle for prominence between abstraction and representation.
“Specific and general, background and foreground” said Bleckner, sitting in the downstairs space at Aspen’s Baldwin Gallery, where upstairs an exhibit of Bleckner’s new paintings is being readied for the next night’s opening. “Irony, tragedy, contradiction, discrepancy – these are things I think about in my studio.” Bleckner’s new works feature the usual dark backdrops, with faint, vague images of abstract light and shapes in the background. In the foreground are balls of bright color which Bleckner says he thinks of an interruption, an mutation.” Several of the paintings also feature a blurred image of a flower. Bleckner says the flower was an image left over from previous works.
The inspiration for the paintings started with an idea about humanity – about anonymity, about how human personalities are in a constant state of fluctuation and blending. That idea, said Bleckner, “ sought an image” Bleckner found that image when he came across a photograph of a common scene: a sporting event with a background of a large crowd of people. Bleckner keeps a notebook of newspaper, poster and magazine images and his own photographs, and often uses these images as a starting point for his paintings. Working from a found image, he started re-imagining that crowd shot as fuzzy paintings that bear little resemblance to the original image.
Bleckner attributes the fuzzy quality of the recent pieces to sharpness of his last series, which inspired by microscopic, cellular images such as human DNA. Again, it is that sense of opposing forces playing in Bleckner’s mind that shows up on his canvases. The last work was precise and close-up; the new paintings are blurred and from a distance.
“The work before this was very sharp” said the 52 year old Bleckner, whose current show – his third at the Baldwin Gallery – opened this week and shows through March 10. (A concurrent exhibit, Sarah Charlesworth: 0 + 1, featuring the white on white photographs by the New York artist Charlesworth, is presented in the downstairs gallery.) “Prior to this, I did paintings that were very close-up, almost realistic, like using electron microscopes. There was something so specific about a DNA structure.
“And that’s why I went back to the fuzziness. I wanted this to be the opposite. I like to make this differentiation between fuzziness and sharpness.”
Fuzziness or a lack of clarity, not only gives the new paintings their visual feel, but also their metaphorical content.
“It has to do with several things,” said Bleckner. “Dissolution, as in blending together, things that blend together, to make the identity of the image less decipherable. I’ve always worked with that idea. Metaphorically, it’s the idea that our identities are always in flux, changing. And anonymity.”
“All the molecular and DNA images were about what was going on inside the body. I wanted these paintings to be about bodies blended together.” In the previous works, “It’s about going close up, so it’s like an examination; and now, it’s going far away, so the identity gets dispersed.”
What the two sets of work have in common is that tug of war between abstraction and representation that has marked Bleckner’s work for most of his nearly 30-year career. Whether viewed as though under a microscope or from a far distance, the actual images that form the basis of Bleckner’s work move away from reality and toward the abstract.
“ When you look at something so close and so long, its abstract,” he said. “But some of my paintings are secret realism in that I’m painting from pictures I’m looking at. They really are dissolving crowds. And prior to this, they really were chains of DNA.
“In the realism, they make my paintings look abstract. What’s abstract and what’s real? What’s abstract is real and what’s real is abstract.
Being Bleckner
Another longstanding, primary issue in Bleckner’s work has been the contrast of dark and light. Whether working in seemingly abstract images, the figures of birds, flowers, and urns he has often used, or the molecular subjects, there is a literal darkness to almost all of the paintings. For the artist, there are rather simple explanations, metaphorical and technical, for all the darkness.
“That’s just a foil for light,” said Bleckner who seems to have a causal nature. “I’d rather bring dark out of light than layer dark over night. It’s just my optimism. Not infantile, but the childlike part of my brain that wants to make things better, make things work. There’s light at the end.”
A major exception to Bleckner’s body of work was the so-called “Stripe” paintings of the early to mid-1980s. All of the paintings feature thin, tight vertical lines, often in bright colors. Some of these contain Bleckner’s “interruptions”: gift bows, bisecting thick lines, birds. While the composition, technique and color are at the odds with the majority of Bleckner’s output, the “Stripe” paintings contain the signature play on perception. But instead of being fuzzy, or torn between the abstract and representational, the “Stripe” works create optical illusions of movement and blending.
“They were really about the impossibility of locating anything in particular,” said Bleckner. “So the opticality of them created something that was really dissolved. It was like an illuminating, a pulsation. And not being able to have one particular identity.”
While Bleckner’s paintings illustrate the shifting quality of identity, his work has been greatly influenced by one particular aspect of identity. As a gay man living in New York in the 1980s, the advent of AIDS got Bleckner’s full attention. And the disease and its effects have made their way into Bleckner’s work. The molecular paintings, most specifically, were a response to the attention people, especially gay men, have had to pay their bodies, their blood.
“There was always a commemorative kind of streak, a strain, in my work. The idea of loss,” said Bleckner, who lives in the Tribeca neighborhood of Downtown Manhattan. “That galvanized it more. It galvanized it a lot of my political sentiments. And a lot of empathy for people, some I know, some I don’t, whose lives get cut off unexpectedly. You think that most people are going to live their actual life spans – and then you realize those are only the lucky ones.
“Before, my work was a little more juvenile, wistful. The way a teenager thinks about morality is about morality is obviously a lot different than your thoughts in your 40s. Morality is a romantic thought to a teenager. Your morality – the more it gets real, the less you dwell on it.”
Through his own teens, painting – art in general – wasn't much of a factor in Bleckner’s life. The house he grew up in, first in Brooklyn and then in the Long Island town of Hewlett, wan’t centered around art. About the only presence of art Bleckner can recall is his mother’s Sunday painting classes, though he notes that artistic pursuits were not discouraged either.
Bleckner drew and painted some, and found that it suited him in some way. “ I always used making art,” he said. “ It always fit my personality profile. It wan’t just about making art; it was about wanting to be alone.”
At New York University, Bleckner majored in art only after he “decided there were no other options. There was a breakthrough moment when I realized I needed to do this and, regardless of the consequences, I was going to do this and express what I wanted to express. That I was good at it, or could make a living, was only a slow recognition.”
About his own place as a successful artist, Bleckner says he’s still not sure. It’s so fragile.”
To any outsider, though, Bleckner’s reputation is sealed. After graduating NYU, he studied at the California Institute of Arts. Since emerging with his New York debut in a group show at the Paula Cooper Gallery, Bleckner has bees grouped with a handful of artists – including David Salle and Eric Fischl, whom he counts as good friends – who have resurrected and interest in painting. In fact, Bleckner was the subject of a mid career, solo retrospective at the Guggenheim in 1995.
Stewart Oskenhorn’s e-mail address is [email protected]
Paul Conrad photo.