With a dramatic painting dripping in front of the artist's busy studio space, seeing the title shot for Zander Blom's exhibition, Monochrome Paintings, makes you wish you could view the works in situ. Though that's kind of the magic of Blom's work anyhow – his style is so distinct and his works are so process-driven that you can't help but get swept up in his world.
The relationship between depth, gravity, and three-dimensionality comes to the fore in this collection, as Blom reminisces, "When I think about gravity in a painting, I think about the weight or mass of shapes, and about how they sit on top of one another, how they weigh on or support one another. Forms can be floating in the air, or crashing around in a room, or about to teeter off the edge of a cliff. The possibilities are endless. Shapes can be static or swirling, tethered tightly or loosely or not at all. Something can be light as a feather blowing in the wind, or as heavy as a tank crushing the world under it. Maybe gravity can even be so strong that it forces a whole composition to implode in on itself? We don’t only see a composition with our eyes but feel it with our bodies." (You can read the full exhibition statement here.)
It's heavy black meets stark white and chaos meets order in these abstract, evocative works. Blom's solo runs until Fri, Dec 13 at Stevenson gallery.
