Additional Images

Provenance:

Galerie Dresdnere, Toronto
Private Collection, Toronto

Literature:

Barry Lord, ‘Ron Bloore and Contemporary Art Criticism,’ Canadian Art Magazine, October 1966, pages 22-24.

Exhibited:

VI Biennial of the Museum of Modern Art, São Paolo, September-December 1961.

Note:

Ron Bloore (1925-2009) was a member of the Regina Five, a group of abstract painters with a focus on art that reflected regional connections and experimentation rather than the production of a national style.

In Abstract Painting #1, a textured white field is pierced by vertiginous black flecked with blues and greens and shocks of yellow, a wonderful clash of noise surrounded by relative calm. Produced on a massive scale, subtle changes in tonality and texture are built up with the care of a topographic map. From a distance there is an inward draw to the painting, a fissure in the ice. However, closer analysis reveals a defined resistance to three-dimensionality. The effect here is emotive but deliberately lacking in significance. “The meaning of any work of art is determined entirely by the individual experiencing it,” Bloore says: what the beholder reveals is an extension of his experience in life, “not a confirmation of what he already knows.” For Bloore, painting is given revelatory power, one that is rooted in the viewer, but demanding a dialogue between lived experience and the image.