ART CITIES:Dubai-Ross Bleckner

Ross Bleckner’s paintings blend abstraction with recognizable symbols to create meditations on perception, transcendence, and loss. In contrast to the prominent painters of the ‘80s who reasserted figuration, Bleckner persisted in his attempts to identify what meaning the abstract image could convincingly hold in our times. As the AIDS health crisis began to take its toll on society at large and on many of Bleckner’s friends and colleagues, his paintings became elegies to specific losses suffered and reflections on bereavement.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Leila Heller Gallery Archive

The paintings of Ross Bleckner provoke a passage into haunted chambers emptied of all but light and dark in which float, perhaps, a hummingbird, a chandelier, a trophy, while others stand like sentries, shades whose shadows obscure our vision and revoke passage into this nether world we cannot yet imagine. In his exhibition “Forever Overhead” at Leila Heller Gallery in Dubai, on show are ten large-scale paintings as well as smaller canvases, wherein according to the artist. For his two type of paintings the artist had said in an interview “Essentially, I want a world to exist that I can get into. A world that has to do with certain kinds of illusion and that is also confrontational. The paintings hold you outside of their making. I work very much like a rubber band. I start with an idea or an image and then I stretch it out and let it collapse back into itself.” Ross Bleckner’s paintings are mediations on light, at once natural and artificial, an effect of and the very substance of the work. Often composing works replete with a pathos of loss, this light puncturing sheets of darkness represents a cautious optimism (a kind of hope) or an aesthetic of, as he states, “An idealistic dystopia”.  The artist continues, “It is about dredging … finding light through the darkness”. Central to the artist’s practice is a methodological layering of paint onto the canvas then scraping it away,a perpetual process of creating and editing, adding and subtraction.

Info: Leila Heller Gallery, I-87 Alserkal Avenue, Al Quoz 1, Dubai, Duration: 29/4-15/6/16, Days & Hours: Sat-Thu 10:00-19:00, www.leilahellergallery.com