ALEX MAR
There’s a deliberate obsession with form in Ross Bleckner’s paintings. They give the impression at first of being abstract exercises at best, striking images, at worst, pure indulgence.
Mr. Bleckner’s technique has been very influential, which both works for him and is held against him. The word "slick" comes up (well, there were those Absolut Vodka ads in 1998). But taken as a whole, his art reveals very explicit references and human even spiritual concerns. The New Yorker’s second solo show at Lehmann Maupin is a chance to see a very smart roundup of recent and older paintings grouped to moving effect.
Mr. Bleckner gave the little-loved Op Art movement a second life with his stripe paintings of the early 1980s. By the middle of the decade, however, he had begun making semi-translucent forms set against deep, void-like color fields. These shapes took the form of urns, flowers, fields of stars, architectural detailing, and human cells in various stages of health and sickness. Many of these works were perceived as being in response to the AIDS crisis the artist himself has said that he is concerned with the mutability of form and "the idea of something beautiful, like a cell, mutating into something treacherous." His art can be read as finding beauty in our inherent vulnerability.
The Maupin exhibit allows the viewer to see Bleckner’s use of strikingly optical, abstract patterns in bold relation with lyrical, living forms (birds in flight, cells adrift). From amongst his 1980s responses to Op Art comes "Untitled" (1987), at once a visual joke and a sonnet on the opposing ends of the universe: two tiny birds, one yellow and one gray and brown, are perched against a powerful, deep background of vertical stripes. This showdown between optical violence and such delicacy creates a palpable tension.
In the back of the main gallery is "Bird Installation," a grouping of about a hundred small paintings of birds in different stages of flight, painted between 1995 and 2003. It’s startling to see: so many rectangles awash in a glowing blue, so many small birds blown back by the wind, frantically batting their wings to keep their altitude, or simply caught in a single frame of rapturous flight. This would come across as embarrassingly sentimental if it were not installed in relation to "Unknown Quantities of Light (Part 2)" (1987) and the hilariously titled "Mysticism for Beginners" (2001): the former a torrent of vertical lines recalling "Untitled," the latter a thin but richly multi-colored cluster of cell-like forms.
Each of these paintings stands up as a formal exercise, but it’s the undeniable emotional content of the show as a whole that gives the individual works legs. The piece which confronts you at the entrance is "Birdland" (2000), a large, dizzying canvas covered in the ghostly blues of a flock of birds suspended in confused, directionless flight. Thrilling forms are all around you, pulsing and changing, determining life and death. You’ll feel ecstatic at the sight.