CHECKERED PASSED (TIED) (#1574) Painting

Jack Balas is an American artist working in painting and photography, cross-referenced at times with writing and other media. A recipient in 1995 of an individual fellowship in painting from the National Endowment for the Arts, he is represented in the Kent Logan Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. A portfolio of his paintings "Today I Drove Along the Rio Grande" was published in issue #120 of The Paris Review (New York).SEEKING QUESTIONS TO LIFE'S BIG ANSWERSThere are three overlapping bodies of current painting and photo work here, all figurative. When I worked with landscape imagery and the constructed environment years ago I liked to talk about formal concerns: painting as map or diary linking visual and verbal, conceptual and material, fact and fiction, abstraction and representation; not to mention a viewer building bridges between disparate ideas. With the paintings here, though, I would simply say I am interested in memorable images. In 2004, while having a solo show in New York, I happened to see "Open House," a show at the Brooklyn Museum featuring 200 artists working in the borough. While my work seemed to fit in more or less with the other galleries in Williamsburg, it seemed far on the opposite end of an emotional spectrum from much of the work in the museum. Hopefully the recent work here goes further in that direction in terms of metaphor, poking around such timeless ideas as: truth, beauty, faith, time, the infinite, what we learn and what we know. It may seem questionable indeed these days to even concern myself with such unanswerables, but in an era when political and spiritual leaders assert that they in fact have the answers for us all, I think that art has the capacity to imagine otherwise, to offer some transcendent spark to bridge the gap between intent and form, between idea and the evidence of our lives.MUSE / MUSEUM (2006)These new paintings hand-render museum and gallery ad layouts from art magazines, combining them with painted imagery and engaging issues of autonomy and persona at the same time. Asking questions about the artists complicity with the mechanics and hierarchy of presentation (the work, the work in a museum, the work in a book, etc.) there is a certain power-taking that accompanies these appropriations, one that posits the artist as director and producer.