How to Survive the Present | A Solo Show by Ross Bleckner

September 19, 2019January 7, 2020

Allouche Benias Gallery is delighted to announce “How to Survive the Present”, a Solo Show by Ross Bleckner. Through a collection of the artist's famous painted works, the human body is brilliantly embodied in the fragility and transience of a flower amputated from its core.

Always concerned by the realization that immortality is not an option, Ross Bleckner created this series of work as a dedication to the departed. The appropriation of dystopic and melancholic elements opens an illusionistic passage into haunted painterly spaces, where small echoes of light capture the sentiment of healing from disease or emotional pain.

Through Bleckner's practice, the question of what remains after is reignited. The synopsis of our life-story is mirrored in the works of art as a visual manifestation of tranquility. Like the impressionists, he paints moments in the continuum. Reality is assimilated as a collective construction of unique perspectives, always escaping life; identity is then conceived within instants of endless possibilities.

The short lifespan of flowers appears to be the perfect objective for experiment. When abandoned in their mortality, they become just a trace of something that existed. However, a flower, once reproduced iconographically, escapes the unavoidable end-point of being. It has been gifted with the ability to signify an eternal essence of a life that can never be repeated.

The repetition of motives keeps the forgotten to-be in a conscious, active remembrance, clarifying that the way to be alive forever is through momentary recollection. The passage of time now decelerates and art gains the ability to remain current and ever-lasting in an ever-evolving world.

The brief duration of our presence makes perfection unachievable and dissapointment unavoidable. Nevertheless, the dynamic of painting experience overcomes the void of death and the nothingness that follows, to reveal a new necessity of desire and belief. Desire to see things for the first time, even if we've looked at them before. Belief that things will not stay unfinished, that the death of ideas hasn't arrived yet. The future takes a positive turn, as long as we survive the present.