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.