Notes

In 2011, Zander Blom exhibited a new series of abstract paintings in Johannesburg. The exhibition included lot 162. While still gestural and rooted in a dominant palette of black and white, Blom’s new work marked a shift from his earlier style of painting on untreated Belgian linen. Many of the new works featured painted grounds of undifferentiated colour – red, yellow, blue, green, purple or black paint – on which Blom staged his marks. These marks ranged from precisely concentrated brush marks to random smears and slender tendrils of spilt paint. His instinct for mark-making and overall sense of composition was plain to see.

Blom is a strong believer in narrating his own practice and has since the publication of The Drain of Progress (2007) produced texts to accompany his exhibitions. For his 2011 exhibition, Blom noted: ‘The term ‘easel painting’ is one I’m very fond of. It suggests many things, but above all the possibility of a life that is uncomplicated, unaffected, even peaceful. It is a place where you do not need to rely on the efforts of a whole team of assistants or a massive production budget for a successful
outcome. A place where an individual can work at their own pace on their own terms, relying almost solely on their wit, intellect, ability, instinct and critical sense. Where each work, no matter what shape or size, can be equally important or effective. A place where you can sit down, have a cup of coffee and read a book while trying to figure out how to solve a new problem.’¹

Blom’s exhibition was well received by ArtThrob, which characterised his experimental paintings as explorative of surface and ground. ‘Painting thin layers over each other has given the surfaces an incandescence onto which the artist has affectively thrown the paint to create his marks. Perhaps the gestural confinement of some of his examples could be attributed to the fact that the paint is so thick. However, the stretching moment that his work addresses feels as if it originates from the inside out and not beyond the limits of the frame.’²

Blom’s curiosity for how paint operates at the surface of a canvas was also a point of deliberation for Courtney J. Martin, current director of the Yale Center for British Art, in a 2013 essay: "The oil is literal. It is there on the canvas as an unrepentant trace of the material composition of paint. The oil is in two distinct indexical relationships with the paint that records how it gets to the canvas, and with the linen which shows what it does once it is there. It is a demonstration of what paint can do, how it comes into being and meaning… His process reminds us that here, at the dark edge of the digital age, painterly, expressionist abstraction can be experimental, refreshing, weird even.^’3

^1. Zander Blom (2011), Artist statement for exhibition New Paintings, Stevenson: http://archive.stevenson.info/exhibitions/blom/index2011.html
^2. – (2011) ‘Painting by Clive van den Berg and Zander Blom’, ArtThrob, November: http://archive.stevenson.info/artists/blom/Articles/2011_artthrob_nov_2011.pdf
^3. Courtney J. Martin (2013) ‘Modernism’s Fantasy: Zander Blom’s painting till now’, in Zander Blom: Paintings, Volume 1, Cape Town: Stevenson, page 13.

Exhibited

Stevenson, Johannesburg, New Paintings, 27 October to 6 December 2011.

Literature

Courtney J. Martin (2013) Paintings Volume 1: Zander Blom, Johannesburg: Stevenson, illustrated in colour on page 211.