|
The
mainstream of today's taste in abstraction calls for allover patterns
rather than, say, a figure/ground dichotomy (too stodgy) or a single-color
field (too academic), a highly refined sense of surface, and the kind
of untouched-by-hands technique that inspires wonder. People these days
like their abstraction impure, for instance, if as an image it echoes
some previous stylistic phenomenon (whether emotionally charged or just
piquantly quotidian) or suggests an origin in some other medium, like
TV or photography. Such associations allow for overtones of nostalgia
without breaking the barrier of cool.
This style originated, pretty much, with Ross
Bleckner's work of the 80's, and it has been adopted in varying degrees
by a wide swathe of younger painters. Two concurrent shows of his recent
work suggests that now Bleckner in turn seems to have been spurred by
the challenge of his young admirer-competitors to push himself to develop
an even slicker, more eye-catching technique, which has (perhaps surprisingly)
resulted in some of his strongest and most expansive paintings. Unlike
the work of most of the young pretenders, though, the best of Bleckner's
new paintings are huge - 10 by 9 feet - as if challenging the spirits
of precursors like Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko as well. And if Bleckner's
intention was to prove that, contrary to all we've ever been taught, slick
can also be sublime, he's pulled it off, at least intermittently.
The AbEx masters were often concerned with the
establishment of a distance and its breakdown. Rothko spoke of seeking
an effect of intimacy, and the same thing is implied in the notice Newman
posted at one of his exhibitions: "There is a tendency to look at
large pictures from a distance. The large pictures in this exhibition
are intended to be seen from a short distance." The intention was
not to overpower the viewer but to create a habitable space of color and
light; the same is true with Bleckner, only his means are different: Instead
|
|
of
broad, open fields of individual colors, we have vast accumulations
of tiny cellular dots, dark at their centers but shading into brightness
at their edges like the shapes in a solarized photograph. In some of
the paintings these cells simply clump together in such a way that their
individual variations in size or ratios of light to darkness create
zones of uneven density. More often, these tiny units are bunched up
so as to create a second order of organic structures, which may even
have nucleus-like centers of a distinct color. In either case, the multiplicity
of minute, irregular patches endows the embracing pictorial field with
a strong feeling of mobility and plasticity, as well as an implicit
tactility quite distinct from the more "optical" expanses
of pure color espoused by Newman or Rothko.
The best of these paintings are near-grisailles, with
just a single color, usually yellow, added to gray and white of varying
shades. (Yellow is an interesting choice, since it evokes both gladdening
associations with solar light and warmth, and dismal ones of illness
and warning.) In the somewhat smaller paintings shown at Mary Boone
Gallery, in which Bleckner threaded a number of colors through and around
his cellular conglomerations, the effect was disturbingly arbitrary,
and the cell imagery was articulated in too literal a fashion. And it
was misguided to show some weak photo-works based on newspaper appropriations
à la early Sarah Charlesworth (seen at Lehmann Maupin). Yet in
some of his new paintings Bleckner achieves a unique blend of authority
and sweetness, reaffirming the scope of his project by continuing to
change while remaining true to his beginnings.
BARRY SCHWABSKY
|