Ross Bleckner: Tolerance, 1998, oil on linen, 120" x 108"; at Lehmann Maupin

Ross Bleckner  
at  Mary  Boone  and 
Lehmann  Maupin
Ross Bleckner has a canny ability to come up with just the right amount of variation on his familiar brand of moody, transcendentalist painting to keep art audiences enthralled. The recent works he presented simultaneously in two galleries large (up to 10-by-9 feet) and medium-sized paintings uptown at Boone and five large canvases and a series of photos at Lehmann Maupin in Sharers something of a departure. He continues his experiments with atmospheric, quasi-illusionistic spaces, but all the new paintings are completely abstract and show no trace of brushwork.
     Setting aside the urns, birds and flowers that were central to his earlier images, Bleckner has settled on a repeated format of allover compositions

packed with countless abutting cell-like shapes rendered by means of an airbrush. To create the look of multitudes of three-dimensional "cells," he places the canvas on the floor and sprinkles it with dots of oil pigment. While still wet, each dot is blasted with a powerful, finely focused airbrush, which smoothes out the paint into a more-or-less round spot with dark edges and a lighter hued, translucent center; sometimes bare canvas is revealed, at other times a colored ground. In general, the works that were shown downtown are austere and nearly monochromatic images of minimalist design, while those shown uptown are somewhat more colorful and complex.
    Tolerance is a 10-by-9-foot work featuring clusters of gray cell-shapes, each with a pale yellow core. Arranged in an irregular grid, the shapes can be seen as nearly identical rows of skin cells viewed under a microscope. Times and Communities, another large canvas, suggests a vast ocean of gray bubbles, gently activated in certain areas by thin layers of darker gray underpainting. These works have an obsessive, hypnotic feel and a mysterious luminosity that recalls paintings by artists ranging from Yayoi Kusama to William Wood. But many of Bleckner’s most striking new works feature red shapes that appear to refer to blood cells. Like many of his earlier paintings, they suggest meditations on the body, health, disease and especially AIDS-related death. Clonal Selection, for example, resembles a drop of blood trapped in a glass slide to be viewed under a microscope. Certain of the "platelets" are extremely irregular, suggesting mutant or damaged cells. But Bleckner never gets too heavy-handed in his references. (As if to undermine the potential sobriety of his endeavor, he recently created an Absolut ad using his new painting style.) In the recent work, he seems to have reached a new level of achievement in formal, abstract terms, without diminishing the power of his ongoing themes.
                        -David Ebony