An Excavation of Quiet Ambience

Jimbo Blachly has returned to painting after a 30-year hiatus, working in a manner informed by his employment in a conservation studio that brings him into close contact with twentieth century paintings. “Intimate, fragmentary, allusive, Blachly’s small canvases evoke at once romantic depictions of sublime experience (from earlier Europeans like Palmer and Turner to the later Americans like Blakelock and Ryder) and modernist abstraction a la Palermo or the late work of Picabia,” according to the gallery. “And yet the relation between these references is strangely and perhaps surprisingly unified—since it is as if Blachly zooms in to the figurative, dramatic world of Romantic painting in order to reveal a domain of largely figureless abstraction, of downtime within the world of the sublime.”