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DiggJeffrey Blondes 2006
February 23, 2006- April 1, 2006
Jeffrey Blondes
Reeves Contemporary
535 W 24th StOn February 23 rd Reeves Contemporary opens an exhibition of work by Jeffrey Blondes that includes 52 new paintings and a 52 hour video installation. The artist’s reception is on March 2nd between 6-8 p.m. with the show continuing through April 1 st. The Ingleby Gallery of Edinburgh, Scotland, presented this installation in its entirety for the very first time at the London Art Fair this past January to great acclaim. Reeves Contemporary is pleased to premiere this installation in the United States.
Jeffery Blondes is an American artist who has been living and working in France for the past twenty-five years. This most recent project, 52 hour film: 52 paintings, will come as a surprise to an audience familiar with his twenty years as a landscape painter; however, he began his career with a camera and has always brought a photographer’s eye to his plein air painting.
The film he has made is an unusual one: 52 hours long and with neither characters nor narrative. It presents a picture of a tree at the edge of a pond in the French countryside filmed from a fixed point for an hour a week, every week, from start of January to the end of December 2005. Simultaneously, he made a painting – one each week, for 52 weeks -- in his usual manner: standing alone in the landscape working oil paint into gessoed wood.
It is a very ordinary image in which, from minute to minute and painting to painting, almost nothing happens: save a slight shift in weather or a flash of sunlight behind cloud, and yet despite this almost catatonic level of inactivity it is strangely compelling. There is a pervasive sense of expectation and promise of what might be about to happen. In the context of the overall presentation, film-making presents a natural progression of Blondes’ will to watch and record the simple facts of nature that he has hitherto expressed in paint.
The film is not intended to be viewed in a single sitting, but rather experienced as if it were itself a constantly shifting painting, depicting the life of a tree and the passing of time. It is an extraordinary sequence with an understated magic born from the simplicity of both its method and subject.
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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