Lisa Blas: Infinite folds : Lacuna(e), 2019 - present
“Blue: as yellow is always accompanied with light, so it may be said that blue still brings a principle of darkness with it. This color has a peculiar and almost indescribable effect on the eye. As a hue it is powerful - but it is on the negative side, and in its highest purity is, as it were, a stimulating negation. Its appearance, then, is a kind of contradiction between excitement and repose.”
Lacuna(e), v. 6, blue hour(s), east : west autoportrait
Acrylic and interference paint on canvas, 60 x 72 inches, 2020, Private collection, Los Angeles
For the last several years I have focused on the fragility of the natural world caused by human intervention, climate change, and meteorological events. I use abstraction and typographical fields to evoke such fragility. The sources for my work are located in art history, newspaper feeds and photography. This approach folds past and present, where the viewer might experience moments of déjà vu. Each painting is made with a high key palette composed of thin layers of acrylic, metallic and interference paint, to achieve a particular optical depth. In some of the paintings, I use negative space within the composition to highlight and activate a void or gap. In others, the brushwork and painterly marks attempt to immerse the viewer within the pictorial space. What emerges are still lives or landscapes that hover in a space of physicality or disembodiment.
In my neighborhood of midtown west, there are many hotels and the movement of people and waste. En route from home to studio, I began noticing large bins of sheets and towels exiting and entering such hotels at night. Trucks arrive for the pickup of dirty laundry, while simultaneously delivering clean laundry wrapped in plastic. The baroque shapes and sculptural quality of this lightweight material is reminiscent of Renaissance folds, yet it originates from the remnants of invisible labor, tourism and everyday life. I began to capture this nightly occurrence with my iPhone camera as references for this new body of work. An ephemeral dance of light and space in painting is also a stand-in for the strain on water resources and the environment at large.
Lisa Blas 2019