Ronald Bladen
Ronald Bladen's new wall pieces at both Washburn galleries exist in that ideal zone of geometric abstraction where precision is used as a tool to build from out of the imagination objects of balance and refinement. These constructions of wood and aluminum are as playful and useful as the George Washington Bridge and assembled in much the same way — with the minimalists' taste for purity but a child's enjoyment of playing and constructing with blocks. They bring the cross-town traffic baggage in our minds to a peaceful standstill.A frontal view is often deceptive. He could have mounted his aluminum sheets on much simpler bases and from the front we wouldn't have noticed much difference, but these pieces are meant to be surveyed from the sides as well as the functional construction of the wood—the inner workings—are integral to the spirit of the pieces.
Like Japanese homes, the structures are built by joining blocks of wood together in a symmetrical, harmonious arrangement where layers are built up and cross beams join to form grids and intersecting planes. Like the transformer toys so popular now, they look, because they're built from so many pieces, as if they're capable of being rearranged into some new metamorphosis.
They have the sleekness and stripped down stateliness of a Frank Lloyd Wright design or a piece of furniture. The sheets of bowed aluminum give some of the pieces a suggestion of a radar dish—but a radar scanning the subtleties of our own quiet thoughts. His titles, too, are accompaniments to the moods and evocations that we get from them: Aura, Moment, Monarch, Sea Shine, Kerouac's Road . . .
If art is merely something that you just don't see anywhere else, though it's functionally useless and can be said to be a luxury of a society of excess, we still need to dream and these objects are telescopes sighted precisely in that direction.