Photo: courtesy Ruth Bachofhner Gallery
Capturing the essence of light has long been a concern of modern artists, from its earliest European manifestations to the legacy of California artists, from Granville Redmond’s poppy field paintings to Larry Bell’s translucent boxes. As evidenced from his recent show in the back gallery of Ruth Bachofner, it seems that Texas-born, Los Angeles-based painter Douglas C. Bloom has caught the bug. His new work purposefully accentuates the effects of light, melding them into the artist’s larger preoccupations with the contrasting traditions of representation and abstraction. In an earlier series, Bloom’s source material revolved around the art world, where blurred renderings of museum-goers—the “representational”—were often set against hanging works of art which the artist replaced with rectangular blocks of a single solid hue—the “abstract.” While the artist discusses the work in terms of the formal contrasts that lie on the surface, these works can also be read as a commentary of the transitory attentions of our hyper-paced culture against the seeming permanence of these treasured objets d’art.
In his recent exhibition, titled “Seismic Light,” the Bloom moves from the material to the natural world, and removes the human figure entirely, taking the viewer of his works along solitary strolls through forested meadows. In What Passes for Silence (2013), the light source is offstage, yet the artist retains the contrast of blurred modulation against a flat, almost decorative, style: tall, thin trees constructed of a irregular vertical stripes are accented by strident shadows against the blurred backdrop of the forest. In Naturalist (2014), the shadows are removed, unsettling the illusion of space so that the flat-colored trees seem almost to hover over the distorted background. In many of these works, the light source—somewhat awkwardly rendered—becomes a central point that disrupts the viewing experience, radiating reverberations and disruptions across the painted surface. In Promise of Shadows (2014), the trunks and shadows of the trees are almost indistinguishable from one another, creating an almost hypnotic pattern across the surface of the canvas. And just as the earlier works, which juxtapose people and art, the current paintings also set the ephemeral against the seemingly permanent, as Bloom contrasts the fluctuating waves of light against the steadfast stillness of the trees.