HILARIE M. SHEETS
This show offered a bite-sized retrospective, setting several recent canvases by Ross Bleckner in the context of work dating back more than 15 years. What has remained consistent between abstraction and representation. What feels new is a shift away from the elegiac—his paintings have often been seen as memento mori—toward the buoyant, with orbs proliferating across the new canvases suggesting the potential of life.
The two earliest paintings, from 1987, brim with vertical rods perceptually shifting in and out of focus. One, with grays and whites and whites and shafts of yellow coursing down, is studded with six spots of intense yellow pigment, like beacons, or souls, or beams of light diffused by rain. In the other paintings, the matrix of stripes, which obscure more than reveal, is penetrated by two birds breaking through, which presage a theme Bleckner was to focus on later.
His white birds—flitting across an expansive field of midnight blue on one canvas from 2000, and individually or in small groupings on some 100 little paintings made between 1995 and 2003 that were hung lost souls. Wistful and ghostly, these paintings are unabashedly beautiful and evoke Dutch still lifes festooned with birds for the feast. The wall of little paintings also echoes Christian Boltanski’s installations of blurred faces as a collective memorial.
The three most recent full-size paintings, from 2001-2002, show the artist experimenting with multicolored volumetric circles that conjure thought of bubbles, molecules, Christmas ornaments, and geodes, as in Mysticism of Beginners, with its glowing orbs clustered into effervescent chains.