Commune: Ross Bleckner

In Commune, delicate outlines of figures, plants, sinuous lines and colour fields seem flooded with light, as if briefly arising in our visual field from the iridescent dark ground. The compositions at times flicker in our perception, shifting from abstract shapes, to celestial bodies, to human heads. They are reflections on the possibility of communing with the external world and the importance of empathy with others during the moments of social and political turmoil. As the artist notes, “To commune with someone, to commune with something is the blending of you and something outside of yourself, something bigger than you. Hopefully that’s what’s being an artist, and that is what art is about.”

In Two Meet Again, radiant lines overlap and dance in space, configuring into an ethereal image of an encounter between two people. Ghost-like and transparent, the figures appear to float on the verge of recognition, suggesting a fleeting thought or a mental image of human relations. Part of an important series dedicated to the memory of a close friend of the artist, Two Meet Again is a meditation on the possibility of holding onto an image or a sense of presence of another over time. Intertwining with each other and with the outer network of lines, the figures are continually in a state of becoming, arising and disappearing, transcending the weight of loss through the awareness of the present moment.

For Bleckner, the soft focus of his compositions reflects the workings of the mind, now attentive, now oblivious. Considering the relationship between biological and psychic, cellular and celestial, the works in Commune interrogate the vulnerability of the human condition and humanity’s place in the natural order. In What is the Grass, the artist begins with a scan of the human brain, transforming the network of synaptic connections into an image which at once evokes a floral meadow and a constellation in space. Alternating between the micro and the macro, the composition embraces the complexity of systems that are beyond our understanding or control. As the artist remarked, “There is an ineffable quality of imagery that you can locate but it always slips through. Things aren't in our control as we would like them to be, they have a fluid quality and they keep moving and changing. That's a kind of Buddhist idea. This is something that we get used to either willingly or unwillingly - things change.”