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Ross Bleckner American
painter Ross Bleckner is currently showing some new paintings based on
cellular patters at Interim Art in London. In Bleckner's own words, his
art "deals literally and metaphorically with the idea of death"
and while his latest works are slightly lighter in tonality than usual,
illuminated by a murky aquatic glow, the fixation with mortality remains.
Most of them share the same formal base; a ground layer of brushy gray
oil is overlaid with big, defocused, monochrome strings of pea-like forms.
Over these are painted, in a stunning realist style, complexly interlinked
necklaces of cell-like shapes cantained in translucent tubular membranes
and colored pale green, brain-gray, and flesh-pink. In some cases Bleckner
has painted this covering in a semi-opaque gray, lending it a queasilly
glutinous cast. Up close, these paintings are an optical treat, the eye
slides easily from the sharply delineated and intricately interlaced tangles
of multi-colored enzyemes, to the obscure, darker shapes lurking behind
them. One admires the way Bleckner delicately grafts cell-strings onto
each other, the way the subect matter dissolves into pure painterliness
- these tangles are like scribbly paint strokes rendered psysical, solid.
The deployment of this rich miasma ranges from the Jonahan Lasker-like
isolating of circlar forms in works such as Enhancers, to the
intricate whirl of rotating linkages in Large Closed Link. Another
canvas features knotted, ropelike compoint cells that are more monochromatic
and, it seems, unhealthy: a genetic mutation gone wrong. The all-over
explosion of rosy red platelets in the hemoglobin-infused New Radical
seems stable enough until one notices the small arrow painting to one
of the circles - a rogue in their midst. Oscillating continually between
pseudo-scientific representation and allusive abstraction, these paintings
put human creation under the microscope: the findings are both mournful
and miraculous. |
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