Ross Bleckners new paintings

Aimee Rankin interviewed Ross Bleckner a million years ago, okay 1987, for Bomb Magazine, and I really enjoyed their conversation about his work. It seems apt today as exhibition of new paintings just opened at Mary Boone.

Aimee Rankin.....You slide from a wish to be abstract to a wish to be illusionistic, a wish to concentrate on the surface of a painting and a wish to create depth. But that kind of slipping that exists in both types of work does come together to point out certain consistencies even if that consistency is an interest in contradiction.
Ross Bleckner I like that idea of slippage. When you set up hierarchy, an iconographic hegemony, you are stating a position and essentially, what you stop doing at that point is you stop opening up a place where that position might be vulnerable. The way that we arrive at meaning, the way our consciousness is constructed has more to do with what’s repressed in it than with what we express by using language. As a condition of our daily lives, all that goes repressed has to be accounted for, somehow. Ambivalence is more true to the way things really are than an iconographic identity. more

Ross Bleckner, ALP30, 84" x 72", oil/linen, 2013 

Ross Bleckner, Brain Rust, 96" x 72", oil/linen, 2013 

Ross Bleckner, Parallel or Anti-Parallel, 102" x 72", oil/linen, 2013