David Blatherwick
"David Blatherwick" by James D. Campell, Winter 2006, p. 84
The seductively loopy compositions exhibited here were in equal part heady portraits of melting cyberjacked synapses and biomorphic romps in painted space. Fusing the technological and the biological in a single frame of reference, David Blatherwick has evolved his painting language while offering ample high-tech and organic eye candy to the viewer’s hungry eye.
In works like Sentence (2005), Delinquent (2005) and Slow (2006), the painter’s tangled skeins of intersecting and overlaid markings result in a wealth of tasty pictorial detail. Blatherwick’s trademark freehand grids, which in his earlier work referenced those of the painter Agnes Martin, now relate more readily to neural networks and chromosome-mapping procedures. Yet there is nothing programmatic about these abstractions. They radiate a sense of hectic organic growth, of ongoing self-replication.
Stringy loops and capillaries straddle their grounds with abandon and a certain squalid beauty. The fields themselves teem with bucolic signifiers that seem very much at home. The brush-stroke capillaries seem to palpate their underlying masses, and thus always possess a distinctly organic resonance. The bio and techno networks enjoy a sort of mutual viral invasion, and the painter’s marks are like signalling mechanisms, a hybrid of the analogical and digital that tells what might be at work there. A sense of unremitting and even feral activity that has an almost aural buzz, like low-level white noise, makes it impossible to remain indifferent.
Not surprisingly, these works reveal Blatherwick’s long-standing interest in biocybernetics and wetware. The latter, a term for the integration of the concepts of the physical reality of the central nervous system and the mental construct known as the mind, is particularly relevant to these paintings. Specifically, its incarnation in science fiction in terms of the cybernetic augmentation of human beings, as in the novels of William Gibson, is like a walk-through for these abstractions. They snake their way inside our heads, wetwired or not.
Paradoxically, in pursuing visual metaphors for a cybernetic interface with the human body, Blatherwick has executed some drop-dead gorgeous works of art that haunt the forebrain of the viewer long after their signals end.
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