Notes

South African artist Zander Blom is best known for his abstract paintings. Within his work, he engages abstraction as a universal idiom linking his contemporary practice to modernist painting traditions, while also rejecting them. Often, he emphasises experimentation through work that simply ‘flows from brain to hand to canvas’.¹ His work is an ever-evolving philosophy that investigates the relationships between painting, its material qualities, and the avant-garde, creating intriguing compositions that can be difficult to penetrate – those he describes as ‘weirdly exciting’ and ‘almost transgressive in their wrongness’.²

The work Untitled (Abstract with Black Squares) brings together various irregular forms – a neutral plane is filled with flattering white marks on black rectangles. This early work, rendered in oil on linen (allowing the oil to seep through parts of the surface), is an interesting interaction of colour, shape and form. The eye picks up nuances and slight variations in the length and size of the marks – these subtle fluctuations add depth to the image. Through a layering of paint, Blom has created an impasto effect that makes the work tactile, inspiring a desire for touch. Like most paintings in his practice, the work is untitled, adding a layer of nuanced ambivalence that contributes to its allure.

¹ Stevenson (2020) Stevenson, Garage-ism, online, https://www.stevenson.info/exhibition/5528, accessed 20 August 2024.

² Zander Blom (2020) The Garage-sim Manifesto, Cape Town: Self Published, pages 1 and 2.