Ross Bleckner
Maureen Paley/Interim Art
Through November 26
American painter Ross Bleckner is currently showing some new paintings based on cellular patterns at Maureen Paley/Interim Art in London. In Bleckner's own words, his art 'deals literally and metaphorically with the idea of death.' His latest works are slightly lighter in tonality than usual, and are illuminated by a murky, aquatic glow, but 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 contained 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 queasily glutinous cast.
Up close, these paintings are an optical treat: the eye slides easily from the sharply delineated and intricately interrelated tangles of multi-colored enzymes, to the obscure, darker shapes lurking behind them. One admires the way Bleckner delicately grafts cell-strings onto each other; the way the subject matter dissolves into pure painterliness - these tangles are like scribbly paint strokes rendered physical, solid.
The deployment of this rich motif ranges from the Jonathan Lasker-like isolating of circular forms in works such as Enhancers, to the intricate whirl of rotating linkages in Large Closed Link. Another canvas features knotted, ropelike compound cells 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 pointing 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.
Martin Herbert
