Small pictures from Jimbo Blachly and Workroom G

 Jimbo Blachly, "Pyre," 2009, oil on canvas, 6” x 8.” Photography by Etienne Frossard

Time Out New York selected "Lanquidity," Jimbo Blachly's show at Winkleman as the Critic's Pick for painting this week. Although Blachly shows regularly with Winkleman as part of the Chadwick Family collaboration with Lytle Shaw, this is his first solo show of paintings at the gallery. The story is that Blachly, who has a day job in an art conservator's studio, secretly took up painting four years ago after a 30-year hiatus. The quality strikes me as uneven, but in the best of them, evocative color, easy brushwork and diminutive size remind me of Albert York's enigmatic landscape paintings combined with Bill Jensen's paintings from the eighties. There's something about Blachly's paintings that makes me want to buy one. Or two. Or three. The exhibition also features piles of moleskin sketchbooks and some framed drawings. I wonder how many other conceptual artists are secretly painting in their spare time...?

Jimbo Blachly, "Double Homage," 2009, oil on canvas, 10” x 8."

  Jimbo Blachly, "Summer #5," 2009, oil on canvas, 12" x 9"

 Jimbo Blachly, installation view at Winkleman.

 "Jimbo Blachly: Lanquidity," Winkleman Gallery, New York, NY. Through April 30, 2011.

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In the Curatorial Research Lab at the back of the gallery, don't miss "Signs on the Road," a three-part installation organized by Workroom G and curated by Gogue Projects (Phase 1), Cathouse FUNeral (Phase 2), Camel Collective (Phase 3). I contributed an image of the mustard-colored Royal Safari typewriter I use to keep track of ideas while I'm painting.

"Signs on the Road," installation view of Phase 2, curated by Cathouse FUNeral. Photography by Karen Miller.

"Artists often fixate on particular found material (imagery, objects, quotes, fragments of text, etc.) that reveals no direct connection to their practice but that possesses for them an enigmatic, resonant meaning. This material may serve as a beacon for their practice, suggesting an unrealized and indeterminate potential for future work. Perhaps this material is the uncanny of artistic practice. For this exhibition we collect such material from over a hundred and fifty artists, each invited to submit a single-page digital file to be printed on an 8×10-inch sheet. This small archive will be handed over to three curatorial collectives, each of whom will mount a treatment and exhibition in the diminutive (10-foot by 10-foot) Curatorial Research Lab at Winkleman Gallery."

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