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Viewing Simon Blau's work it is necessary to consider the ways in which the modalities and gestures of modernist painting now operate as archaic forms. For Blau's work is concerned with the limits of modernist iconographies, of how the epistemological oppositions they validated now fail to accommodate a more contemporary experience.
Expressive modernist language operated symbolically, it assumed the possibility of encoding the "real" as an unmediated totality within which human identity was centrally placed as the source of vision, as the point from which vision emanates. Upon this opposition between an ideal real and an ideal subject there devolved a whole array of paired oppositions; the ephemeral and the concrete, the transcendent and particular, spiritual and sensual, abstract and figurative, depth and surface, form and content, meaning and style, and so forth. Oppositions that artists and philosophers were expected to explore dialectically; creating in this process a unifying vision, a representation or synthesis of the fragments that make up existence.
Blau limits himself to the classical technology of oil on canvas so that he can retraverse the dialectical terrain of critical modernist practices. The world he depicts is an infinitely differentiated, "mediatized" world of displacement and metonymies, in which the task of the artist is not to create visual paradigms so much as find a language for acknowledging the impossibility of such creations. This is not a nostalgic project but a quixotic one, that Blau's work shows as both humourous and painful.
The strategies Blau employs in a canvas entitled Eyeballing exemplify the duplicity of his approach. In this canvas Blau brings together two motifs that recur throughout much of his work, a disgorged eyeball and a television.
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