After the radical puritanism of Conceptualism and Minimalism reduced art to the bare bones of phenomenology in the 1960s, and neo-Expressionism recovered a gestural, figurative painting in the 1970s, a "post-abstract abstraction" took root in the following decade. As a part of this latter revival, loosely referred to as Neo-Geo, Ross Bleckner aligned himself with the late modernist tradition of demystification in painting.
Beginning in the 1980s, Bleckner began to appropriate various styles of painting, such as Op Art and the hard-edge abstraction of the 1950s and 1960s, and started to make vertical stripe paintings. While he simulated the distinctive character of serious abstract composition, Bleckner sought to reinvest such work with narrative elements. In "Double Portrait (Gay Flag)", for example, he adopts both the form and scale of abstract modernist painting, but incorporates into its ostensibly subjectless imagery the rainbow colors of the "gay flag." Moreover, while alluding to the Pop Art precedent of Jasper Johns's flag series, Bleckner introduces another symbol within his symbolic striped pattern, a Star of David-in order to herald his cultural as well as sexual identity-which he paints in three-dimensional low relief, ambiguous but discernible at the top center of the work. Similar dualistic strategies inform numerous other works, such as "Count No Count," where the artist invokes the veil of art historical reference in his use of patters of polka dots to comment on late-1960s abstraction, only to reveal in title and abstract design the additional allusion to AIDS and the critical reference to T cells. Such painting functions as a pastiche of late modernism and contemporary life-as Bleckner inflects the act of appropriation with an autobiographical twist.
By engaging a stylistic form that had decades earlier, with Ad Reinhardt, for example, been emptied of a referential subject, Bleckner negotiates abstraction's exhausted state, realizing that such formalism could be personalized, made disjunctive, reconstructed. Thus Bleckner, along with painters such as Peter Halley and Philip Taaffe, and with the help of a booming art market, resuscitated a medium that had been declared dead by the art-critical establishment. With such painting, Bleckner straddles the fence of twentieth-century painting: invoking the vocabulary of abstraction while critiquing the claims of early modernism art to communicate subliminal and even mystical truths through nonrepresentational art. Bleckner has acknowledged this dialectical position: "The making of art is an act of deception...It's a decoy act. My paintings flirt with belief, both undermining it and establishing it. Essentially, I'm degrading the sublime."
In identifying his subject as both painterly and one integrally tied to his identity as gay and Jewish, Bleckner defines himself as a painter who contravenes the pure imagery of late modernist abstraction and its rigid formalism and dismissal of metaphor. More important, by infusing abstraction with provocative and questioning references to issues of identity and history, the artist takes the ambiguity of perception in Op and Pop Art and grounds it in the real world.