Ross Bleckner at Mary Boone and Lehmann Maupin - Brief Article

Ros Bleckner has a canny ability to draw near up with just the right amount of variation upon his familiar brand of humorsome transcendentalist painting to keep art audiences enthralled. The novel works he presented simultaneously in sum of two units galleries--eight large (up to 10-by-9 feet) and medium-sized paintings uptown at Boone and five large canvases and a series of photos at Lehmann Maupin in SoHo--represent something of a departure. He continues his experiments with atmospheric, quasi-illusionistic spaces, on the other hand all the new paintings are completely abstract and exhibit no trace of brushwork.

Setting aside the urn birds and flowers that were central to his earlier images, Bleckner has settl upon a repeated format of allover compositions packed with countles abutting cell-like shapes pay backed by means of an airbrush. To create the gaze of multitudes of three-dimensional "cells" he places the canvas upon the floor and sprinkles it with dots of oil pigment. While still wet, each dot is blasted with a powerful, finely focused airbrush, which plains out the paint into a more-or-less circular spot with dark edges and a lighter hu translucent center; sometimes bare canvas is revealed, at other times a colored sod In general, the works that were shown downtown are austere and nearly monochromatic images of minimalist design, while those shown uptown are somewhat more colorful and complex

Tolerance is a 10-by-9-foot work featuring clusters of gray cell-shapes, each with a pale fulvid core. Arranged in an irregular grid, the shapes can be seen as nearly identical lines of skin cells viewed below a microscope. Times and Communities, another large canvas, prompts a vast ocean of gray blobs gently activated in certain areas through thin layers of darker gray underpainting. These works have an obsessive, hypnotic have feeling and a mysterious luminosity that recalls paintings by means of artists ranging from Yayoi Kusama to William grove But many of Bleckner's greatest in quantity striking new works feature r shapes that appear to direct to blood cells. Like many of his earlier paintings, they insinuate meditations on the body, health, disease and especially AIDS-related death. Clonal Selection, for example, be likes a drop of blood trapped in a glass slide to be viewed beneath a microscope. Certain of the "platelets" are extremely irregular, suggesting mutant or damaged confined apartments But Bleckner never gets too heavy-handed in his regards (As if to undermine the potential sobriety of his endeavor, he not long ago created an Absolut ad using his fresh painting style.) In the novel work, he seems to have reached a novel level of achievement in formal, abstract boundarys without diminishing the power of his ongoing themes.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group