Black Flash
2009
Roni Feldman
Acrylic spray on canvas
72" x 54"
Photo: courtesy collection of Kiet Mai & Edward Lightner

If arch-Modernist Ad Reinhardt had defiled his purified, reductive Black Square Paintings with all-over monochrome figuration, the result might have been Roni Feldman's Black Flash Paintings. Feldman could be said to practice what Reinhardt's contemporary Greenberg called "homeless representation"--painterliness that is descriptive without abandoning the look and feel of abstraction. Herds of exotic animals, crowds at spectator sports, dances, rowdy parties, protest marches, riots, disasters, funerals, shopping malls, tourist spots, and Hollywood film shoots, merge and float much like abstract squiggles and shapes. Clearly though, they are photo-derived images which are projected then softly airbrushed in either black matte or gloss acrylic. Because of the variable light reflective and absorbent qualities of the mediums, the reaching, grasping, drinking, swaying, embracing, rejoicing, writhing, bodies hover and dissolve, evoking the spectral or ghostly. That "now you see it, now you don't" composition resists a unitary vision, so one must stoop, bend and strain to take in small sections. The optical effect is like holding old black-and-white photo negatives at a certain angle to the light so that positive figures emerge intermittently. Mostly the conflation--or equivalence--of the wriggling, fragmented imagery with broad, gestural brushstrokes and rhythmic forms is an endlessly engaging game, requiring the full experiential sensations of the viewer.

Occasionally, the narrative is overly familiar, such as juxtaposing animal packs to humans en masse to suggest a conformist mob mentality. The repeated watching and gazing depicted so prominently likewise recall the "Society of Spectacle" in which an endless appetite for entertainment casts individuals into a undifferentiated lump of mindless consumers. Feldman is at his best when his formal concerns advance the content, as in the show's title painting Black Flash (2009). A jumble of camera-toting, -loading, -shooting figures, as well as some shunning the shutter, is overlaid with a pervasive pattern of blurry, light reflective circles connoting flashbulbs aimed at the viewer. Whistler's early darkened Nocturnes come immediately to mind. In hardcore abstraction, the bright glowing spheres could provoke a transcendent meditation on an inner or cosmic piercing of the black void. However, doubling as a representation of photography's relentless documentation and objectification, especially in our digital age, the ubiquitous light orbs also imply overexposure. When the two divergent meanings converge through this formal/conceptual sleight of hand, the Modernist black monochrome is transformed, revealing multiple points of light.