Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/715572
5 the ground. They were worked in oil and household paint, with thin jets of petrol squirted onto them and set alight, the subsequently quelled flames leaving scorch-marks and blisters on parts of their surfaces. An act of catharsis, the Encaustics were the precursor to all that has followed. Closest in this show to the Encaustics is Nine Black Dots, in which the eponymous group of dots spark and wheel across the upper edge of a darkly encrusted mass. The cruel beauty of its scorched and stained surface is alive with incident, in paint sprayed, slathered and drizzled. Its high-gloss is both funerary and exotic. One is reminded of Blackburn's admiration for Derek Jarman's black paintings of the 1980s and '90s: paintings as reliquaries and memento mori in which are embedded shards of glass and mirror, medicine bottles and thermometers; the paraphernalia of HIV treatment, the stuff of dark times. When I visited Blackburn's studio early this year the painting Sentinel lay unfinished upon two trestles, the still fluid pool of its surface trembling like liquid mercury. Now set to an impregnable gunmetal gloss, the picture's composition centres on the clearly defined verticals running between the three strips of wood of its substrate. These lines are countered by a series of diagonals: those of an inset triangle and white flare in the right-hand section, and by serried rows at the top edge of the painting, small scarifications made whilst the surface was still workable. The mottled triangular wedge that serves as its focal point is edged in scratches as though sutured, its scraped-in cross a nod not only to Fautrier and Tàpies, but also to Calvary. Whereas Blackburn's compositions often centre on a handful of predominant forms, in others there is a greater proliferation, of components both smaller in scale and less hierarchical in their inter-relationships. The horizontal Long White Abstract with Orange and Blue (1960) is one such work, as is the recent White Arrowhead. At first sight the composition of this painting, with its playful touches Nine Black Dots, 2011/12 Sentinel, 2010 (re-worked 2016)