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ROSS BLECKNER
Maureen Paley Interim Art London
October 26 to November 26
For just about any other artist, a mention on Sex and the City
would mean it was all over. But not for Ross Bleckner - his paintings
were a backdrop to cocktails and Upper East Side gossip way before the
episode in which the at Wall Street hunk used one of them to lure successfully
one of the series' female leads up to his penthouse apartment. So bleckner
needn't worry, his paintings have always been so much more than the stuff
of a middle-brow make-out: their innate imperviousness to meaning, coupled
with the fact that they are always metamorphosing, keeps them one step
ahead of being completely assimilated into the mainstream.
There is, however, one easily comprehensible
element that is common to all of Bleckner's paintings: light. Indeed,
one could even go so far as to suggest that in this very element which
has always organized his pictorial field - the most renowned case being
the stroboscopic effect he achieved by running a number of dark vertical
lines in front of a beam of light. Many critics have claimed that the
intensity of such an effect suggests there is a metaphysical dimension
to the work. But this is pure hyperbole. Sometimes light is just light
- and Bleckner is a master at manipulating it. Surprisingly, in these
six new paintings light effects are played down.
The largest of the new paintings, New Radical,
(all works 2000), is easily the most impressive. It is organized by an
all-over pattern of interlocking circular discs, all of which nudge against
one another as they float around in a luminous pictorial space that, from
a distance, appears to be kept alive purely through nuances in tone. Move
in closer and it becomes clear though how the sheer range of paint handling
counterpoints these tonal differences - both of which inform the relative
translucency or opacity of the individual discs, in turn determining where
they might sit in space. Unusually for Bleckner, the painting is almost
modernist in structure, the narrowness of the tonal range working to establish
a taut and relatively firm picture plane. Similarly, the slick oil technique
of previous paintings - the very element to have announced his repudiation
of modernist painting (simultaneously bringing him closer to academic
painting and modern photography) - is, for now, left behind. Instead,
the paint is matt and dry, almost chalky and cracking at its most opaque
points (usually where the discs overlap).
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A painting
as successful as New Radical is more than enough to reaffirm
Bleckner's position as a major painter. But one might dispute the inclusion
of the four smallest paintings here. In simply ricocheting between a
photographic background of telescoped molecules and a more painterly
and colourful foreground of swirling cellular chains, these appear far
too binary in configuration, and so are no rival for the subtle nuances
of New Radical. In other words, perhaps this modest - and certainly
long overdue - solo exhibition attempts to do too much and would have
benefited from either presenting a smaller slice of his new paintings,
or showing six paintings that were each quite different.
The remaining painting, Linkage Map,
just misses; nevertheless, it is successful in retroactively enriching
any reading of New Radical. The various cellular structures
that float upon the silvery background of Linkage Map are surrounded
by a shimmering halo-like effect, clearly created by the white underpainting.
Ny returning to New Radical, the way white underpins this painting
can now also be perceived: each of the frontal discs are actually planted
on top of a white disc of the same circumference, thus lending the former
their luminosity. In both paintings, Bleckner just about achieves a
continuity with his past by giving us glimpses of light, a peak here,
as one of the discs in New Radical does not perfectly eclipse
its white underlayer, a hint there, as the silvery scumble of Linkage
Map runs dry before reaching the canvas's edge and so allows the
white underpainting to breathe.
All of which is to say that, at times, Bleckner's
paintings are still as sensually alluring a s ever. It is thus unfortunate
that the scriptwriters of Sex and the City altogether missed
how loaded their Bleckner quip really was. For previously, the titles
and images many of his paintings carried have either registered or memorialized
the impact of the AIDS epidemic on New York society. And in a TV series
in which each of the lead characters swap bed partners nightly, the
use of Bleckner's painting as a lure for unprotected sex strikes one
as an overlooked irony.
ALEX COLES
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