Ross Bleckner at Mary Boone - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Ros Bleckner's latest incarnation of the dot insinuates a melting cupcake, a marshmallow, an overripe chrysanthemum or a puffball peony He extends the dot in bleary, allover patterns. He isolates the plangent puffball as an orb that nearly fills the canvas, like a Noland target or a Mondrian flower. Each fuzzy module is unfolded with small bleating strokes, and each has a hard-edge oval eye-form reserv from its throbbing mass that recalls the artist's early affection for Larry Poons's '60 dot paintings. Bleckner's combination of hard and yielding flourishes makes his dots pulsate against the painting's earth which more often than not has been rubbed down to a scratchy grisaille or other modulated into a multicolored field, oftentimes evocative of an Ed Ruscha sunset

The canvases in the big expanse at Mary Boone's snappy of recent origin midtown gallery were mostly inflected with saturated and burnt colors--yellow, orange, sienna, magenta, jade. The result was heavy, autumnal and perhaps intentionally cloying. Bleckner's confectionery whites really popp across the darkened space, perhaps because each shape is for a like reason tonally developed and is thus often made to vibrate against a smudg black contour. The fine whetstone for News depicts a big, sad sunflower that fills the vertical format with its culturally freighted faculty of perception of melancholy, the sunflower being a well-known surrogate for van Gogh's suffering. Now Bleckner's image of a burnt golden orb is so full of atmospheric space and air that it in turn round suggests a nod to earlier abstractionists like Dan Christensen, whose airbrushed arabesques were especially popular in the late 1960 and early '70 when Bleckner was just coming of age. notwithstanding the artist gets his hold form of abstracted petulance going in the precisely restoreed forms of in-turning desiccated frond almost as if the sunflower were sporting a Titus haircut.

The canvases in the smaller side gallery mark the transition of the artist's signature dot from puffball to fluid vesicle In color they are altogether paler, more rubbed-down and limpid than the other works, and in temper they are rather more buoyant. In Sickness and In Health is the fullest achievement in all regards. With its irregular network of transparent spherule forms, through which one can glimpse a secondary pattern of white orbs, with here and there an emerging floral shape, the painting manages to combine and synthesize all of Bleckner's frequently seemingly disparate genres. It is at one time a stringent abstraction, a syrupy flower painting and a slightly loony latter-day Symbolist allegory of germination. Bleckner here attains a virtuoso horizontal of glazing in his community of transparent lily-pad forms: not since Joseph Raffael's large field paintings of the '70 has there been similar a maniacally crafted approach to landscape abstraction. In the midst of their exquisite melancholy, these novel paintings look to be among the lightest, happiest and certainly greatest in quantity masterful things Bleckner has done in years.

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