LUCAS BLALOCK – INSOLUBLE PANCAKES
2020-02-24Blalock’s photographs, if we can call them such, are all self-portraits. In fact, they each start from the same set of five 4×5 negatives taken within a few moments of each other. These compressed and re-combined slices of time repeat but not wholly – as if the tape of the moment were being played back over and over again to an unexpected variety of effects. There is something a little flat-footed about the staging of this image (or these images) of the artist flailing in a chair – shadow boxing or daemon fighting – but it acts as a kind of scaffolding that supports a bevy of bizarre and baroque interventions. Like an early 20th century Spiritualist photograph of supernatural presence these pictures present a material world haunted by another. With those predecessors in mind, which point to a wide-eyed belief in otherworldly dimensions as much they speak about the way pictures intersected with technology, meaning and experience in the last century, we might ask what exactly Blalock is drawing here. What new relationships is he creating? How might we consider these weird hybrid pictures?
Opposite – #4 Divney (Popeye), 2019
Exhibition runs through to March 21st, 2020
Rodolphe Janssen
Rue de Livourne 32 Livornostraat
B-1050 Brussels
Belgium
