LINDA YABLONSKY
Mary Boone Gallery, through June 23
No matter what anyone else says, illusion and metaphor are still the big engines of art, and Ross Bleckner mastered both long ago. Keeping to the theme of mortality that is central to his work, he's recently pushed the chemistry of the body to the forefront. The tight, nearly monochromatic swell os tiny ovoid forms that he introduced in his 1998 New York shows made inescapable allusions to metastasizing cancer cells. Those cells return in five of the six big new paintings here, but now the forms are larger, rounder, marked with color and translucence; they brim with good health and good cheer. In fact, they look like Christmas-tree ornaments that glow from within.
The reddish hues and overlapping globes of Flow and Return and New Radical bobble all over their neutral gray grounds, clearly suggesting the composition of blood. In Mysticism for Beginners, the replicating spheres are more widely spaced against a stark white ground, and are so brightly pigmented that they resemble the polka dots of clown suits, though they also evoke three-dimensional models of DNA. O Room, the most interesting of the group, is a loose, flesh-pink-and-white vertical grid of orbs so pale and weightless they seem to hover over the canvas's surface, as if they were uncertain about where to touch down.
The lone out-of-body experience is Blue Star, whose cosmos of shooting stars pointedly makes reference to Bleckner's more funerary abstractions of the 1980's, though it too is lighter in tone. This painting dominates the gallery with its marked shift in technique and a dynamism that tends to draw attention away from the rest, whose images, no matter how bright and bouncy, seem frozen in place by comparison. Blue Star is also the only painting in the show that the artist trusted his brushwork to complete; the others, each colored ball has been blasted with an airbrush. This has produced rather magical effects - some spheres look like eyes or pools of water - without quite communication the quickened pulse of the artist's very sure hand.