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JACK BALAS
(1955-)For years my work has encompassed painting and photography, with occasional works in sculpture, writing, and other media mixed in for variety. When I worked with landscape imagery and the constructed environment in painting years ago I liked to talk about formal concerns: painting as map or diary or arena linking visual and verbal, conceptual and material, fact and fiction, abstraction and representation; not to mention a blend of styles and a viewer building bridges between disparate ideas and iconographies. While all this remains true, with the paintings today I would say that, given how many images we are all bombarded with every day via the media, I am simply interested in making memorable ones.
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The figure has taken center stage since 2003, and my goal with the young men who dominate the images and constitute my muse is to present them as everyman, reaching beyond the fleeting surface idealization associated with youth and hopefully going far in terms of metaphor, poking around such timeless ideas 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 unanswerables, 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, to offer some transcendent spark to bridge the gap between intent and form, between idea and the evidence of our lives. Muse indeed.
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The current paintings and drawings sometimes put aside seamless spaces in favor of multiple and disjunctive ones. At the same time there is a continued interest in mapmaking and the idea of the document. Since 2002 I have been numbering the 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, embellished over the course of days and enriched by simultaneous, if discordant, ideas. Sometimes when I take a very long time to resolve a particular work I give it two numbers -- where it was in the queue when I first began, and where it was when I finished, thereby implying that the intervening works can have informed it in some way. This is especially true when I go back and rework something that I had "finished" years earlier. For me the work is always fair game for reappraisal -- something that seems to happen in everyday life as well.
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The works are annotated with words or images that, when compiled into a book or exhibition or globe, suggest reading from left to right, right to left, upside-down or inside-out. My goal is to make images that are memorable not only via their stylistic variety, in a sense creating flags that signal a kind of symbolic territory, but also to offer you a kind of map where it is your responsibility to build bridges across the middleground between images and ideas. The beauty, hopefully, of interpreting such a construct, then, is that while I might think I may have layed out a map in front of you, I cannot guess where you might choose to go, or even which route you might take.
JACK BALAS
Current viewing_room
