|
Maya Bloch, MB1069, Untitled
(Inner Appearances), 2010
acrylic
on canvas, 59x47 inches
Courtesy
of Thierry Goldberg Projects, New York
MAYA BLOCH
hello stranger
February
27 - April 3, 2011
Thierry Goldberg Projects is pleased
to present Hello Stranger, new work by MAYA
BLOCH. Showing figures that veer towards abstraction,
the paintings convey an ongoing drama between order and
disintegration, clarity and confusion. Hovering sublimely on
the canvas, the haunting revenants seem to insist alternately
on their irrevocable strangeness and their irrepressible
palpability, leaving the viewer both excluded and
captivated.
On
the verge of absconding into a total disarray of nebulous
swashes and cloudy, coagulating hues, the characters in
Bloch's paintings, while flirting with abstraction,
nevertheless remain figurative. It is largely, though not
exclusively, the penetrating eyes (bringing to mind the heads
of Edvard Munch) that tend to pin the figures into place,
reinforcing their concreteness and bodily presence. In
Untitled ("Inner Appearances"), it is the dark,
unflinching gazes that implacably haunt the picture, acting as
a stay against confusion for the surrounding features.
Additionally, in this painting, as in Untitled ("Three
Figures"), a backdrop of black striations imprisons the
image, organizing the bodies in space. Unsure of whether the
direct address of the figures' gazes is more solidly
confrontati onal or elusively impenetrable, viewers find
themselves simultaneously unsettled and allured by such unsure
apparitions.
And
yet despite the hold of the gazes, and the bold assertiveness
of the vertical lines, the process of deterioration and the
danger of dissolution seem to haunt Bloch's work to no end.
The paintings, as though endowed with the quality of
photographic film, seem to have been overexposed to the light,
leaving some areas of the image bleached, charred, or almost
entirely destroyed. Recalling the disconcerting figures of
Marlene Dumas or James Ensor, a sense of precariousness
pervades. And while colors engage in textured conversation
with other colors, it is not always harmoniously so - swashes
of curdling grays, scorched ivories, riveted blues and
permeating reds all dissolve one into the other, as though
each pigment were a kind of species always at risk of becoming
completely overrun by some other species. Amorphousness, as in
Francis Bacon's work, is key here. And so, while juxtaposition
allows for sublime interactions, it also opens up the
floodgates for possible extinction.
And
yet the paintings are not despairing. Indeed, the artist,
using found images as inspiration, has, as such, made the
canvas a site for the reconstruction of scenes otherwise
forgotten and unknown, resurrecting and reconstituting faces
otherwise unremembered. Layers are never at a loss in the
wavering between light and dark, translucence and opacity, on
Bloch's canvases, all of which is suggestive of the
never-ending secretiveness and impenetrability of history,
whose shifting aspects, varying facets, and inexhaustible
strata beg to be revealed, however fraught or fragmented such
revelations may be.
There
is overall, in Bloch's work, a sense of it being unclear
whether the convergence of opposites occurring both in terms
of color and form, is more likely to err on the side of
fruitful conference or deadly collision. The outcome, at best,
is unclear. Or rather, the result is not the point in these
paintings - it is the tension being enacted that enlivens and
enthralls the canvases; in and through whose persistent
irresolution we, as viewers, find ourselves deeply
stirred.
Maya Bloch was born in Be'er Sheva,
Israel in 1978, and currently lives and works in Tel Aviv. She
holds a B.A. and an M.A. from Tel Aviv University. She has
previously had a solo exhibition at Thierry-Goldberg Projects,
as well as at the Haifa Museum of Art and at Tavi Dresdner
Gallery in Tel Aviv. Her work was also included in group
exhibitions at PPOW Gallery, New York; Marlborough Gallery,
New York; The Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Brooklyn, NY;
Artists' House, Jerusalem; Office in Tel Aviv Gallery; and
HAKITA Gallery, Tel Aviv.
THIERRY GOLDBERG PROJECTS
5
Rivington St
New
York, NY 10002
T +1
212.967.2260
|
