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Paul Bloodgood reviewed in TimeOut New York

Paul Bloodgood Thing Language Bloodgood’s abstract canvases suggest maps and aerial views.

By Anne Doran

Paul Bloodgood’s gently centrifugal abstractions of the past few years—airy compositions in which sinuous organic forms eddied in white space—imagined landscape as both external reality and internal experience. His new works, more cartographic than topographic, ramp up the idea of nature as an interactive field. Arrangements of solid, irregular shapes overlaid with fine green lines, they conjure the synthetic landscapes of maps, GPS screens and satellite images. The textures and colors of the paint have changed as well, from feathery tracings of John Marin–like blues, greens and browns to impastos of stucco yellow, scrapings of brick red and patches of swimming pool blue.

Bloodgood’s mediated process somewhat de-skills the art of composition. He first makes a preparatory collage of details appropriated from his own and others’ works. An oil study follows, which roughly traces the interior and exterior contours of the collage, and serves as a schematic for the final painting. One such study on view here features loosely rendered white shapes bumping across a brownish-green ground. The large canvas based on its outlines, a stiff patchwork of orange, aqua, blue, green and red forms suggesting an interior by Matisse, bears it little resemblance.

Two other works are different takes on the same basic structure. In one, archipelagos of sky blue float on a dark blue ground; in the other, pale ocher and dark red silhouettes jockey for position as figure rather than ground. Their pairing illustrates the admixture of found and invented in Bloodgood’s work. The result is neither wholly sublime nor wholly awkward—in these difficult but seductive paintings, it is both.

Time Out New York / Issue 766 : Jun 3–9, 2010