JACK BALAS: SEEKING QUESTIONS TO LIFE'S BIG ANSWERS
For years, my work has focused on painting and photography, with occasional works in other media fixed in for variety. Across them all, I have been interested in linking the visual and the verbal, conceptual and material, the viewer and history, fact and fiction, abstraction and representation. Broad territory, granted, but I have long been interested in maps, and the idea that you, the viewer, can build bridges between images and ideas, interpreting a construct where, despite my intent to have laid out a map in front of you, I can not guess where you might choose to go, nor even which route you might take.
This exhibition offers you paintings alone, some going back to 1999 and appropriation. In 2002, I began to paint images derived from personal photographs, annotated with words or stories in an attempt to touch an emotional level I felt was embedded there. But in 2004, while having a solo show of that work in New York at a Brooklyn gallery, I had the chance to see an exhibition at the Brooklyn museum called "Open House," a show featuring over 200 artists currently working in the borough. While my work seemed to fit in more or less with the other galleries up and down the street in Williamsburg, it was surreal to hop on the subway and go in ten minutes from the BM over to My Show -- primarily because of a sense that I was far on the opposite end of an emotional spectrum from most of the work in the museum. At first I didn't know if that was good, but I have been asking myself since how I can work further towards those things that are especially important to me, while taking advantage of painting's inherent strengths.
The newer works here are the beginning of a response. I have put aside a single-frame lens-based approach in favor of metaphor. Both landscape and figures have become more iconic and, while I continue to number pieces sequentially and sometimes stamp them with the dates I worked on them - - perhaps in an attempt to keep track of time, but also, perhaps, to consider that experience is cumulative and overlapping, enriched by simultaneous, if discordant, ideas - - I have also de-emphasized diaristic encounters with subject matter in favor of some timeless ideas such as: truth, beauty, faith, time, the infinite, what we learn and what we know.
It may seem questionable indeed these days to even concern myself with such unaswerables, but in an era when political and spiritual leaders assert that they in fact have the answers for us all, I think that art has the capacity to imagine otherwise. I believe in the malleability of the painted form, in the constant regeneration of ideas manifest among my fellow artists in New York, out west and around the globe, and especially in the potential for some transcendent spark to bridge the gap between intent and form, between idea and the evidence of our lives. Ann Philbin, Director of the UCLA Hammer Museum, commented recently that "(painting's) death has been announced time and time again without, in the end, seeming to affect the continuing vitality of the medium."* I would simply say that all bets are off.
* Quoted in "The Undiscovered Country," by Russell Ferguson; Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles, 2004; p. 5.
