Art News recommended by Yong Chen : Ronald Bladen at Danese

Ronald Bladen at Danese
Art in America, June-July, 2005 by Stephen Westfall

A short time after his death in 1988, 38 paintings were found in Ronald Bladen's studio, behind a wall he had built back in 1978. They are expressionistically gestural works, intensely colored and almost glutinous in their mortar-like thickness. Whether the artist ever wanted them to see the light of day is uncertain, but since he did not destroy them outright, we are left to assume that what he mostly felt toward them was ambivalence. It's easy to see why. For an artist best known as an audacious and supremely elegant Minimalist sculptor, these paintings (all ca. 1956-59) represent a rude "return of the repressed"--Symbolist imagery and Abstract-Expressionist materiality pushed to a scatological extreme. And they do document a period of his artistic development, in the late 1950s, that had already won respect from fellow artists, if not the larger public. Bill Jensen and Guy Goodwin are among those who admired not only the paintings themselves, but also the labor it took to make them. To destroy them would have meant obliterating work that was already part of studio lore.

The paintings shown at Danese are rich in reference to organic form, suggesting fantastic landscape and still life, and their optically descriptive spatiality seems more related to the Cobra artists than to the second- and third-generation Abstract Expressionists that might first come to mind. Although Bladen's paintings are much heavier across their surfaces than, say, Clyfford Still's (the Abstract Expressionist to whom, in relation to these paintings, he is most often compared), it is easier for the viewer to enter Bladen's pictorial space. The spatiality of Still's art is lateral, extending beyond but not into the picture plane. If you could somehow transmute yourself, taking on the material density of Bladen's paint, you would have places to go in his pictures. That's because they are pictures in the conventional sense, despite their otherwise radical materiality. A painting such as Upside Down-or even Autumn, with its frontally stacked, horizontal banded passages of color--pulls in a bit from the edge of the canvas, so that the view is compositionally enclosed. There is a discernible, if oddly colored, deep space, and bright hues are buttressed by earth tones, as if to literalize the landscape associations.

Those looking for clues to Bladen's later Minimalism will not find them in this work. But it's the artist's right to contradict--or simply exhaust--himself with one style of art-making before settling on another. Bladen's paintings anticipate what Bill Jensen was to achieve decades later and what Dona Nelson is doing now. How successful are they as artworks? It's hard to take your eyes off them, and I imagine that any kid not overly encumbered with irony would think, looking at them today, that painting might still be something worth doing.

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