oil on linen

Artwork date: 2011
Signature details: signed and dated on the reverse
Literature: Sophie Perryer (ed.) (2013). Paintings: Volume I 2010–2012: Zander Blom, Cape Town: Stevenson. Illustrated in colour on p.212.

(1)

105 x 75 cm

Notes:

‘This is abstraction, real abstraction. The dirty messy kind that shapes itself into an unexplainable planar logic as your eye moves faster than your body ever could up, down and around the canvas. Blom locks his viewers into what Lawrence Alloway once proposed as abstraction’s “drama of creativity”.’ (Martin, 10) Courtney J Martin’s words open up a portal into Zander Blom’s practice – his decade-long dialectical incursion to set painterly abstraction free from its place in Modernism. This painting, Untitled (1.96), encapsulates some of the key tropes and textures in his compositional grammar. There’s the dynamism and physicality of his mark-making, the weight and presence of the heavily applied paint and the limited palette of red, white, black and grey – a shout out to the brut hues of Malevich and Mondrian. Then there’s the way the paint seeps into the raw heft of the linen canvas, leaving an indeterminate shadow around the chaotic edges of the form. The presence of paint and oil is offset within the frame by the faint graphite lines that recall Blom’s interrogation of the studio environment as a zone of infinite possibility. If paint and oil are organic traces of the human expressive urge in motion, the geometric lines introduce an architectonic tension that references the rationality, grids, plots and controlled calibrations coded into certain strains of Modernism. Each of these elements are native to Blom’s abstract idiom.What gives this painting its particular power is the centrality, cohesion and explosiveness of the central form. Read in relation to the artist’s strictly non-figurative experiments in painting – his fierce interest in the non-imagistic shapes of dots, dabs, pulls, blurs and splotches – this shape teeters on the charged edge of the figurative, signalling toward the pulsing ultra-pop symbol of the heart. In this sense, it might be seen to have more in common with his drawings and to pre-figure his painterly shift away from abstraction in Paintings and Posters (2017).

Alexandra Dodd

Sources:

This painting appears on page 212 of Paintings Volume I: 2010–2012 – Zander Blom, a catalogue raisonné of paintings by Blom between 2010-2012, as cited below.

Martin, Courtney J. (2013) ‘Modernism’s Fantasy: Zander Blom’s painting till now.’ Paintings Volume I: 2010–2012 – Zander Blom, Cape Town: Stevenson.