Jeff Bliumis

JEFF BLIUMIS

Cover: Regular, 2019, oil on canvas, 20x16 in.

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ANGELICA SEMMELBAUER / Art Advisor angelica@ellipsis-art.com

JEFF BLIUMIS

Photo credit: Justin Bettman

Born in 1958 in Chișinău, Moldova (formerly part of the USSR), Jeff Bliumis graduated from Schusiev Art School, and after emigrating to the United States in 1973, he studied at Columbia University, earning a BA in mathematics. Yet even there “he took as many art classes as he could”, deeply feeling his calling.

He pursued his graduate degree at Berkeley University, while participating in art classes at California College of Arts and Crafts. Fully realizing that he was far more interested in art then mathematics, Jeff moved to New York City and dedicated himself fully to art. Living and working in the SoHo neighborhood of New York in the 1980s meant meeting and collaborating with many artists of that generation and being immersed in the SoHo art scene - Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring had their first solo shows in storefront space there; the 1986 show, “Neo-Geo” (“Neo-Geometric Conceptualism”). The artists that directly inspired Jeff included: Dennis Oppenheim, Claes Oldenburg, Helen Frankenthaler, Cindy Sherman, Andres Serrano, Louise Bourgeois, David Salle, Frank Stella, John Chamberlain, Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Halley, Ashley Bick­erton, and Meyer Vaisman.

Through his seemingly pure abstract forms and an expressive line of almost journalistic quality, the artist imbues his canvases with a strong narrative meaning. You want to know the people in his paintings. Where did they come from?

What is their journey? As the artist often notes, when he moves quickly from drawing to painting, it allows him to capture the essence of the moment, as ‘beautiful mistakes”. Often the people in the foreground are exaggerated, as the artist plays with our sense of perspective; hands are often elongated and foreshortening skewed.

Through his dynamic and intricate story-telling, Jeff’s abstract compositions bring together seemingly opposing aesthetic approaches - the images are part-figurative, part-abstract, part-symbolic. The artist turns his paintings into sensuous and meditative journeys.

With an energetic burst of primary colors and an expressive line, his paintings gradually dissolve into a more expanded human study. Jeff not only captures delicate human situations, but complex ones, with the intimacy and superb detail of his painterly technique. The paintings become ambiguous in their final resolve: neither fully figurative, nor strictly abstract. The intent is to capture the emotion and essence of a human condition in tandem with its abstraction.

Photo credit: Justin Bettman

Socializing series: Waiting, 2020, oil on canvas, 20x20 in.

Spotlight Operator Toke, 2020, oil on canvas, 20x20 in.

Socializing series: Solitaire, 2020, oil on canvas, 20x16 in.

Socializing series: Brussels Mussels Eaters, 2020 oil on canvas, 53x53 in.

Booth, 2018, oil on canvas, 12x12 in.

Off the Hook, 2020, oil on canvas, 51x51 in.

Pop Art, 2020, oil on canvas, 20x20 in.

Let’s Go, 2020, oil on canvas, 16x12 in.

Pitcher, 2020, oil on canvas, 25x20 in.

Stein of Pale, 2020, oil on canvas, 24x20 in.

Stella, 2020, oil on canvas, 12x12 in.

Speranza, 2020, oil on canvas, 18x14 in.

Prayer series: New Religion, 2020, oil on canvas, 20x20 in.

Prayer series: Gift, 2020, oil on canvas, 20x20 in.

Trip in Progress, 2020, oil on canvas, 20x20 in.

Prince and Wooster, 2020, oil on canvas, 12.5x12.5 in.

Two Flutes, 2017, oil on canvas, 36x36 in.

In Touch, 2018, oil on canvas, 49x49 in.

Gatwick, 2018, oil on canvas, 30x30 in.

Florida, 2017, oil on canvas, 36x36 in.

Hat, 2017, oil on canvas, 24x15 in.

To Go, 2017, oil on canvas, 18x14 in.

Bow, 2017, oil on canvas, 24x18 in.

Neck, 2017, oil on canvas, 14x11 in.

Healthy Choice, 2017, oil on canvas, 51x36 in.

Small Order, 2017, oil on canvas, 12x12 in.

Lucy, 2018, oil on canvas, 36x36 in.

Upstairs Downstairs, 2018, oil on canvas, 48x48 in.

Straight Jacket Catwalk, 2018, oil on canvas, 51x51 in.

Blue Nuns, 2017, oil on canvas, 24x24 in.

Nurse Daisy, 2015, oil on canvas, 40x30 in.

SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2020 Symptoms of Plenty, Spring/Break Art Show, New York, USA, curator Sabine Russ 2019 Gotta Serve Somebody, Gallery Astley, Uttersburg, Sweden, curator Irina Popiashvili Spring/Break Art Show, New York, USA curator Andres Serrano Uber Driver, Parallel, Vienna, Austria About Face, Painting Center, NYC, curator Patricia Spergel, Shazzi Thomas 2018 Cultural Tips For New Americans Under Trump, Spring/Break Art Show, NY, curator Ksenia M. Soboleva 2016 Cultural Tips For New Americans, Popiashvili Gvaberidze Window Project, Tbilisi, Georgia Recent Works, Bushel, Delhi, NY, US 2014 Thank You Paintings Exchange, Denny Gallery, New York, US Casual Conversations, The Laurie M. Tisch Gallery, New York, US 2013 Which Country is the Best to Move to? Galerie Anne de Villepoix, Paris, France A Painting For A Family Dinner, Lecce, Ammirato Culture House, Lecce, Italy A Painting For A Family Dinner, Beijing, Inside-Out Art Museum, Beijing, China 2012 Cultural Tips takeaway, Toomer Labzda Gallery, New York, US Language Barrier and Other Obstacles, Peacock Visual Arts, Aberdeen, UK A Painting For A Family Dinner, Bronx, NoLongerEmpty, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, US Casual Conversations, The National Museum of American Jewish History, Philadelphia, US 2011 Cultural Tips For New Americans, the Festival of Ideas for the New City, the New Museum, NY Global Reach Inc., Andrea Meislin Gallery, NY, US 2010 Cultural Tips For New Americans, Stanislas Bourgain Galerie, Paris, France 2009 Casual Conversations in Brooklyn, Black and White Project Space, Brooklyn, NY 2008 A Painting For A Family Dinner/Bat Yam, Israel, Bat Yam Museum for Contemporary Art, Israel.

Dam Lines, Andrea Meislin Gallery, New York, USA (catalog) Language Barrier/Lower Manhattan, public art project, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, NY Language Barrier–Yellow Pages, Stanislas Bourgain Galerie, Paris, France Hello, USA? Contemporary City Foundation, Moscow, Russia; curator Andrei Parshikov Language Barrier, Pulse, New York, USA 2005 Cloning Factory, MuseumsQuartier, Vienna, Austria

Jeff Bliumis: Glimpses of the Ordinary

By Raphy Sarkissian The sophisticated painterly language that Jeff Bliumis has ingeniously devised paradoxically represents slices of our mass-cultural and private realities, with all of their attractiveness, mundaneness and awkwardness. As if produced through candid snapshots, each attentively orchestrated painting of Bliumis portrays an instance of the reality of our social world through his highly expressive caricatural syntax.

Couples at a bar (Conversation), guests at a diner (Brussels Mussels), a customer at a butcher shop or charcuterie (Off the Hook), passengers traveling awake or asleep on a subway train (Underground), truck drivers carrying out their tasks (Olof), fishmongers behind a seafood counter (Miska): such are the everyday subjects narrated by the imagery of Bliumis, where the coarseness, toil and unease of his depicted figures seem to go hand in hand with the pleasures of their lives.

Giving rise to figuration and abstraction while simultaneously hazing their distinctions, Bliumis constructs the expressively articulated body that asserts its volume, mass, weight and corporeality despite the picture’s overall sense of visual flatness. As the back view of a female figure has been captured in Waiting, with the sitter’s head and right foot abruptly cropped, the black blouse and bright blue pants extend the illusion of shallow space formulated through the chair, whose back is anchored to the picture surface.

Is the placement of the window on the upper left corner here an indirect reference to Matisse’s Dessert: Harmony in Red (1908) at the Hermitage? Or perhaps to the Fauvist master’s View of Notre Dame (1914) at the Museum of Modern Art? Most probably neither, although all three paintings give rise to immanent conversations between pictorial and physical rectangles, between the purely visual depictions of windows and the physical realities of the outer edges of canvases, between the difference of our visual perception of the world and its corporeal reality. The unwieldy hand with red-manicured digits holding a cigarette echoes the foot’s resolute grip of the black thong sandal.

Her stare is our stare. Her gaze is our gaze. Her perception of the abstracted rendition of the wall, smoke and the exterior world is our perception of the loose, gestural brushwork. She smokes the cigarette, privileging us to inhale the second-hand smoke of modernist and contemporary art’s ever-shifting possibilities of aesthetic discourses. These are discourses that are in continuing attempts to restructure themselves based upon visual currents and philosophical tangents. Abstraction appears; figuration disappears; figuration reappears; abstraction and figuration coalesce. We leave postmodernism and enter our phase of post-postmodernism, which is to say a renunciation of all “isms.’ When the grand narratives of Western culture become threatened and “isms” are rejected, metamodernism attempts to take over.

When our gaze at the back of the sitter in the painting of Bliumis becomes coupled with our gaze at the wall and window, our aesthetic journey becomes a discursive one, stratified by consciousnesses that are not mutually exclusive. Blue Pom Pom, To Go, Trip in Progress, Extra Brut, Healthy Choice, Spring and Sullivan Please, A Neck: these paintings become registered in our consciousness. They represent ourselves and our next-door neighbors—pictorially, socially and perceptively.

As a painting that we grasp visually becomes registered within our sensory realm, it alters our lived consciousness and our collective unconscious. The perceived image thus participates in the apprehension of our interior realities, as deftly demonstrated by Picasso in Girl before a Mirror (1932) at the Museum of Modern Art. It is indeed the visually perceived oddities within the paintings of Bliumis that give rise to our existential self-awareness, as if to direct us toward ontological quests or prompt phenomenological queries. “I am all that I see, I am an intersubjective field, not despite

my body and historical situation, but, on the contrary. By being this body and this situation, and through them, all the rest,” explains Maurice Merleau-Ponty in “Freedom,” the final chapter of his Phenomenology of Perception.[1] Within the pictorial output of Bliumis, the body can be perceived as “an intersubjective field,” a dialectic between its utopian and dystopian realities. For a particular observer, each painting of Bliumis enacts a perceptual dialogue between the represented body and that of the viewer—what Merleau-Ponty refers to as “this body” and “this situation.” As the human figures portrayed by Bliumis are at times embodiments of individuals positioned upon the social margin, his portraits are visual studies of the subaltern. Yet Bliumis neither aestheticizes the socially marginalized human figures that appear on his canvases, nor does he formulate pedantic hypotheses of class, ethnology and gender. Rather, his paintings mirror what has been consistently excluded from gallery walls or has become purportedly coded to the extent of a modernist abstraction that is framed through Kantian concerns.

As the pictorial lexicon of Bliumis places equal emphasis on representation and non-representation, thus conveying references to the historical cycles of painting, Solitaire, Bow, Small Order, Florida Moon and Regular richly unfold painting’s formalist narratives, as much as they display moments of the daily lives of those working and living in our multicultural cities. The conversation enacted between figuration and abstraction through each painting of Bliumis can be perceived though the eloquently presented thoughts of Merleau-Ponty on the self and other: “We said that in the perception of the other I cover in intention the infinite distance which always stands between my subjectivity and another, I overcome the impossibility of conceiving another for-himself for me, because I witness another behavior, another presence in the world . . . my living present . . . can also . . . acquire a social horizon, with the result that my world is expanded to the dimensions of the collective history which my private existence takes up and carries forward.”[2] It is no surprise, therefore, that glimpsing at a painting by Bliumis may often attract us to the gestural rendition of figures and spaces, only to simultaneously surprise us through depictions of frequently exaggerated odd faces, heads, torsos, arms and legs. For the oddities of human bodies and the recurrent dismissal of their physiognomic features may indeed reflect the very imperfections of our own bodies and appearances, if not our primordial sense of consciousness of external reality. The imagery of Bliumis are go-betweens, enacting dialogues between the self and the other, making one a mirror-image of the other. So different yet so familiar, “one” is a perceptual being connected to so many “others.” The “individual” is as separable as it is inseparable from the “plural.” The individual’s autonomy is as real as it is a reductive linguistic fabrication.

The meaning of each one of the paintings of Bliumis is left for the viewer to decode, although the socially conscious practice here is all but obfuscating. There is a sense of clarity in his pictorial practice that is as transparent as his thoughts when he writes, for instance: “The habitual immoderation, mindless consumerism, and wastefulness cultivated by our Western market economy are affecting everyone on this planet. And ironically, the disenfranchised, to ensure their own survival, are often forced to become complicit in the global cycle of unsustainable materialism.” It is this double task of literality and stylistic openness that destabilizes the visual canons established upon the central versus marginal, just as Manet’s Olympia began doing so a century-and-a-half ago and continues its task within the insightful and compelling oeuvre of Bliumis.

Raphy Sarkissian is an Art Historian and Critic currently affiliated with the School of Visual Arts in New York. His recent exhibition reviews include those on KAWS, Dan Walsh, Anish Kapoor, Rachel Lee Hovnanian, Sean Scully, Jonas Wood and David Novros.

Notes 1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), p. 452.

2. Ibid., p. 432-33.

ELLIPSIS ART FOUNDER

ANGELICA SEMMELBAUER 2004, NYU Masters Degree, Visual Arts Administration Published graduate thesis focused on building a sustainable global market for Russian Contemporary Art, tracing Russian art through its various historical movements, from Soviet era to the Russian Non-Conformist Movement, to discussion of today’s contemporary art in Russia.

2005 - 2014 Director of Mimi Ferzt Gallery in New York City, which specialized in Russian Non-Conformist and Contemporary Art. Organized important curatorial exhibitions of prominent Russian artists, and successfully placed them in important private and public art collections around the world.

Angelica is currently a Private Art Advisor working with a variety of artists and consulting private clients.

ANGELICA SEMMELBAUER Art Advisor angelica@ellipsis-art.com