Accumulations: Zander Blom at Stevenson

Published on ArtThrob, 11 February 2021.

“‘I think of what I do now,’ Blom writes, ‘as painting installations or gangs of pictures, a mob of images.’ That Garage-ism will then be broken into its discrete parts – sold as individual pieces – denies its apparent logic; that its parts will be brought out of conversation and relation with and to one another, must stand alone, offer their individual faults to be studied. For all are flawed, all imperfect. They offer little as discrete pictures, yet together, they are triumphant. Paintings made in the company of other paintings; parts to be arranged and rearranged. They are unsuited to stasis, to long looking; much as they were made – never considered into submission – they demand a restless seeing. To reduce the work to only a single fragment, set in a frame and fixed to a wall, is to deny the atonal aspirations of Blom’s Garage-ism; to furnish the fragment with a staid attention it neither demands nor deserves. Indeed, the work’s many parts are resolutely, wonderfully mediocre, bold in their failings. Which is not to say they fail, not at all, only that they have about them a radical honesty. ‘Just because something has that damp garage feeling,’ as Blom writes, ‘doesn’t mean it can’t also be urgent, powerful, remarkable, subtle, beautiful and timeless in its own way.’”

Read the full review here.