Marc Blake: Recent Works

“What History, our History, allows us today is merely to slide, to vary, to exceed, to repudiate”. Barthes. (Harrison & Wood: 265)

Marc Blake’s paintings already exist before they are painted. Every element is part of another reality, from the landscape on wood grain to a horse and girl, air balloons and rainbows, they’ve all been seen before. Some objects are recognisable. References to art and artists; Jeff Koon’s ‘Balloon Dog’ and Hokusai’s wave are carefully placed in an ‘all over’ composition giving the effect of flattened space, a strategy used by historical Japanese painters and printmakers. The trees also appear to have a Japanese influence, yet often pohutakawa is in bloom. Maybe the eastern feel is in the way they have literally been stunted, a bonsai on the surface of the board. Yet in the illusionary space of the painting they are life-size and stand like figures, signalling across the painting to each other. Objects of consumption and popular culture can be found alongside historical elements. Bungie jumpers and yellow-eyed penguins have come to signify a contemporary New Zealand culture, cars and guns, a world we see often in the media. A historical sailing ship seems almost as an apparition coming out of the misty sea, or is it land? Has time and space merged together?

There appears to be some indication of time passed yet the exact time can’t be placed. Maybe the works suggest the future, barren lands, red skies and a fragile environment where a gas mask is often seen. Memories of what was are left as shadows, rubbed out, scratched off, fuzzy and disappearing into the coloured wood grain. In areas the background becomes the foreground or the sea becomes the sky but all of the elements seem to work together, finding grounding in the grain of the wood. The illusion of three-dimensional space is only suggested by light stains in a natural grain or in the size of the specific elements in the work. Figures dressed in everyday contemporary clothing, seem to act out part of a narrative, floating on the surface in paint on wood yet grounded in the illusionary space. Men in corporate attire, sumo wrestlers in board shorts, girls in black singlets and jeans or dresses or underwear, stand alone, yet seem to be interacting with someone or something.

But what are these interactions taking place? And how do these various elements relate to each other? Blake places us in front of a painting, and we are compelled to read the image, to translate the history played out in the work- to work out what is or what is coming. But signifiers are switched, and common symbols are re-addressed. Koon’s ‘Balloon Dog’ becomes a self-referential sign of contemporary art and businessmen in suits now exist within a constructed world of wood. The yellow-eyed penguin walks alone, perhaps signifying isolation or extinction through a changing environment. The original meaning that these objects signify have shifted, “even one and the same sign … re-occupied, translated, re- historicized and read in a new way”. (von Bismark: 264) The story in the painting unfolds within each viewer’s translation. Seeing a black and white suit next to a girl with a gun takes one from Wall Street into a world of gangsters. There is no one reading, but a group of readings, a group of stories. The painting becomes a text of the moment that unfolds by the associations and relationships within the work. Blake asks us to readdress what we know as the everyday and historical. This contemporary world before us is constructed from the past and our history; who we are, where we are and what we know
effects how we read and analyse the stories he presents.

Blake has moved from Auckland, to Japan, back to Auckland and on to Sydney. The narratives and the journeys that unfold within his paintings reflect this global movement and the many influences seen and experienced in everyday life. Blake asks us to reflect on our history and consider our future; on what has been, what could be but also opening up the possibility of change. In reading and interpreting the text that is the painting, the viewer explores and develops their ideas, questioning stereotypes, and challenging the way signs are perceived in mass culture.

References:

Von Bismark, B. “Generating Space: Martha Rosler’s Representational Process”. MaSchube. Hannover, Sprengel Museum Hannover, 2005: 252 – 283.

Harrison, Charles & Paul Wood. “Roland Barthes (1915 – 1980) ‘From Work to Text’, Art in Theory 1900 – 2000- An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Blackwell Publishing: MA, Oxford, Victoria, 965 – 970.

For more information about Marc Blake, view his website.