HALSEY MCKAY GALLERY

NOVEMBER 11 DECEMBER 22, 2016

56 HENRY STREET, NEW YORK, NY, 10002

For the second installment of Hovering, at our 56 Henry Street location, Ben Blatt navigates the contemporary digital environment through traditional means. His newest suite of paintings seek to exploit the limitations of the pixelated image and the illusion of reality in the digital landscape. In these compositions, Blatt’s most abstract to date, he uses carefully chosen bytes of pictorial imagery derived from digital imaging software. Blatt focuses on an information melting point between natural, and artificial visual worlds. Using basic photo editing of everyday images, he magnifies the beautiful contradiction and irony of the software’s flawed dedication to simultaneously mimic and obfuscate a selected representational image. These selections are then rendered by hand with immaculate precision in acrylic, ink and dye.

Hovering focuses on idiosyncrasies native to the digital landscape, such as algorithmic color, software compression, image capture, and pixelization.  Blatt often chooses images that formerly had no relationship to digital culture, and zooms in on details that illuminate the “deontologizing” capacity of compression software. Using pure color as an elemental ground to build upon, Blatt applies layers of transparent dye and tinted mediums over his compositions to create microclimates that quiver, fog, and billow across this traditional ground.

Through these paintings Blatt sees a chance for reconciliation between idealistic notions, where the material and physical color of the painter engages with the synthetic and systematic color of the digital realm. Using his characteristic touch, Blatt grants a palpable depth to these digital subjects, bringing a sense of human “soul” back into a coded environment. 

Click HERE to see the previous iteration of Hovering, in East Hampton.

Ben Blatt lives and works in Red Hook, NY. He was born in Denver, Colorado and received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2001 and his MFA from The University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 2016. His work has been exhibited in New York at White Columns, Half Gallery, Halsey McKay Gallery, at the John Michael Kohler Art Center in Sheboygan, WI, and at V1 Gallery in Copenhagen, Denmark.