ART

ROSS BLECKNER
It could be said that Bleckner took Op Art to a higher spiritual plane. His best paintings not only emit an uncanny luminescence but have long had to do with body and spirit, AIDS and mortality. Now everyone's talking about his radically new work. Roiling with cellular proliferations (downtown), invaded by amoebic nuclei (uptown), it looks like nothing else. Bleckner's New York Times page three series, however, looks very much like something else: didn't another artist do the same news photo-Tiffany ad appropriation a while ago? As for Bleckner's remarkable cellular technique, it involves bursts from a compressed air jet, pushing the paint one cell at a time. Through December 19, Lehmann Maupin gallery, 39 Greene Street, and Mary Boone Gallery, 745 Fifth Avenue. (Levin)