PRESENTATION: Blair Thurman-Spook Rock Road (Kasino-Kut)

As a boy in the ‘60s, Blair Thurman spent a lot of time at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, where his mother was director. As an art student in the ‘80s, he sought to escape prevailing theoretical concerns. Thurman’s work owes as much to his command of a broad range of media as to subconscious influences. Parallel to, and sometimes in combination with his paintings, he has transposed his signature imagery into neon.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: FRAC Normandie Caen Archive

In his sculptures and installations, Blair Thurman, a painter at heart, explores the history of painting and its place in our media-saturated contemporary culture. Using the traditional materials of painting, wooden stretchers, canvas, and paint, often in combination with neon tubing (so closely associated with advertising signage), he crafts representational and abstract forms that reference the histories of abstraction, Minimalism, and Pop Art, and the excesses of commercial consumer culture. Beyond the shaped paintings, Blair Thurman expresses through the neon production, with an use of vibrant colors and sinuous shapes evoking writings, drawings, signs, his proximity to the world of mass culture, pop art and minimalism. Thurman boasts a prolific career with international performances. The unusual scale of “Spook Rock Road (Kasino-Kut)” provides Blair Thurman with an opportunity to present large-scale pictorial installations that serve as a framework for a body of new sculptures and paintings. The allusion to “casino” in the title of the exhibition is an indication of Thurman’s method, which always allows for chance in his compositions. His art is affiliated with the aesthetic of the found object, one of the foundations of modern art. But with him, it is also forms, structures and patterns, which we find transposed in his works. These found forms include, for example, automobile circuits, the frame of a chair, or a printed pattern… This does not mean that his art is “about” these found things; the world of the car, or of the game, are here a portal to the painting, they are shortcuts taken to determine a form. His point of departure can also be a play on words or a homonymy, as in the analogy between a chassis for painting and a car chassis, both of which are seen as supports for the painted surface. His new three-dimensional works, made from boned buggies topped with a parasol, are more specifically reminiscent of junk sculpture (the creations of Ed Kienholz or Robert Rauschenberg, for example), while the large installations made of monochrome panels are a transposition of the art of “assemblage” into painting. The paintings are assembled as in a house of cards, and define an environment which can make one think of the surroundings of a racetrack. Their colors are inspired by the chromatic range of comic books from the 60s and 70s. Neon sculptures punctuate the course, reinforcing its urban dimension.

Photo: Blair Thurman, Gallery Go Round 4, 2018. Neon tubes, transformers, electrical components, dimensions, © Blair Thurman, Courtesy the artist and FRAC Normandie Caen

Info: FRAC Normandie Caen, 7 bis Rue Neuve Bourg l’Abbé, Caen, France, Duration: 19/11/2022-19/3/2023, Days & Hours: Wed-Sun 14:00-18:00, www.fracnormandiecaen.fr/