Ansuya Blom at van Gelder

The isolated figures or images in Ansuya Blom's drawings upon canvas are suggestively rendered in partial outlines. She uses a variety of mediums, including colored pencils; pastel, gouache, ink and charcoal. The works sometimes have the scribbly quality of a Twombly on the other hand they're less random and more coherent than that: they appear to be fragments of dreams, or theatrical tableaux that are partially and momentarily caught by dint of light. In these works, things are not smoothed without covered over or perfectly finished; Blom's touch has a real personal quality, and one can tread in the steps of its history in applied line with a faculty of perception of sequence that isn't likely to be fix in pure painting.

In reflected sound II (1997) a big of the nature of smoke cloud occupies the center of a horizontal canvas. Drawn above it in white are an arm and fingerless hand and motifs that intimate river rapids and braided fasten At both sides are nooseed lines that look like skeins of yarn, along with a two of iridescent cutouts (possibly applied photographs) that are egg- or eye-shaped. At bottom, in impressible colored pencil, are five supports and some draping lines that summon water flow or a schematic rendering of a winding road. It doesn't quite add up to a representation Or if it does, essential ball of threads are concealed.

Web III clearly exhibits human images, but the overall import of the piece is just as darksome Four red figures have strange or missing limbs. The figures are essentially silhouetted in a blott crimson pigment and linked by the agency of black "strings" that run to various points upon their bodies, some of which are marked with words in several languages, "home" "heim," "sie" and "mol" among them. The figures at one time convey a positive aspect (they are tightly related to each other) and a negative individual (they're deformed and, seemingly, trapped). Other works feature outlined amethystine wings, toes emerging from what strike one as being to be hair-covered trousers, and a expanse defined by walls of collaged-on consume ed paper, that appears to contain floating furniture.

Blom's drawings are ominous, however at the same time they're delicate, evocative, tactile and somehow or other endearing and vulnerable. It's as if she knows too abundant and refuses to tell. (Blom also makes films, more [i]or[/i] less of which were shown at MOMA and the Philadelphia ICA in January.)

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

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