Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/715572
8 gloss over matt. The central cleft of black marks between the two panels is a point both of entry and exit, a space between life and death. Above are thousands of teeming spore-like dots, laboriously applied with a dressmaker's wheel to frayed strips of worn canvas, heavily stained in a dilute scarlet. Amongst the works shown here, this visceral painting is as close to obvious metaphor as Blackburn gets. Whereas painterly gesture takes precedence in the diptych, an insistent formal structure can be found in the compositional symmetries of the largest and most ambitious work here, Triptych (Autumn). The main shapes of this Byzantine work are formed out of dozens of empty plastic blister-packs. 4 Blackburn has made a number of paintings incorporating these packs in recent years, of which this is the most complex. The regular and malleable structure they provide is akin to strips of mosaic, to be integrated in joined formations and engulfed in paint. The triptych has the desolate beauty of a decaying frieze or fresco, its chalky surfaces smeared in ice cream pinks, lilac and verdigris, the edges of some of the individual pockets of the blister-packs rimmed in red like puncture wounds. Embedded here and there are small traces of life (evocative reminders of Jarman's black paintings): a card of antique shirt buttons; bits of discarded household textiles; a thread, coiled like hair in a Victorian locket; a circuit- board fossilised as though the relic of a lost civilisation; a tiny circular mirror mottled in decay. Much of the central panel is swathed in flesh-coloured pigment as though the artist has painted his own presence across it. Blackburn has described the work as reminiscent of the aerial view of a munitions plant, or of that when flying over Tokyo or Siberia. It is a work pregnant with associations: amongst my notes jotted down whilst in the studio are words and phrases including: archaeology, field patterns, fortifications, a bombed city, 'the clays of a cold star', catacombs, honeycomb, aggregation and excavation. 5 Though Blackburn's delicacy of application is most Yellow Form Entering, 2010/11 (re-worked 2016) Triptych Autumn, 2013 (re-worked 2015/16)