Artists We Love: Zander Blom

WORDS Malibongwe Tyilo

Artist Zander Blom’s recent exhibition at Cape Town’s Stevenson Gallery, titled New Paintings, sees him further explore his fascination with and talent for painting, especially looking to the influence of two great 20^th century artists, Pablo Picasso and Piet Mondrian.

In Zander’s own words, “In terms of influence I have generally favoured warm-blooded chameleons like Picasso over stiff squares – excuse the pun – like Mondrian. Previously, to me, this simply meant: Picasso was interesting and having the best time, while Mondrian was boring and having a drab time. But now that I’m in my 30s, doubt has entered the room, as it tends to do, and I’ve started to re-evaluate old Piet.” We caught up with the artist to chat painting and his latest exhibition.

What drew you to the works of Mondrian and Picasso?

Mondrian and Picasso never really leave my mind or the studio. Their books are all over the house. They are a bit like uncles, I didn’t choose them, they have just somehow always been part of my life. 

Elements in your work have a suggestion of Formalism, which is then interrupted with a bit of your own playfulness/experimentation. Is it indeed Formalism interrupted?

You can also say generic composition interrupted. I enjoy making ridiculous, illogical, bizarre compositional choices – choices that aren’t supposed to lead to successful paintings – and see if I can somehow make it work, pull it off.

Formalism in Modernism was about judging an artwork’s success purely on its form, on basic design elements like colour, line, composition and texture, while ignoring contextual and conceptual elements. So I suppose I am somewhat of a formalist but on the other hand I would happily place my painting practice under the banner ‘Critical Form’. Because in today’s world, abstraction can no longer aspire to being a pure expression. In each shape, each gesture, lies some kind of quote or reference to the past, whether you intend it or not. Form has context and all contemporary art is laced with some kind of conceptualism. So a black square will reference Malevich, drips quote Pollock, and if you make a crude drawing there will be talk of Outsider Art, or Dada, or Surrealism etc, etc, etc. So painting today has a really dense and complex language that only gets deeper as time goes on. Everybody has to find their own way through this. For me it’s been via a kind of cross-reference mash-up which relies on Formalist strategies as much as it does on the conceptual and contextual.

You have said in the past that as an artist gets better at their technique it can become a prison, especially as they become more pedantic. How do you ensure a spirit of constant experimentation in your own work, so that you don’t become a prisoner of your own mastery?

I think it is all about what motivates you. I am motivated by a desire to keep learning new things and innovate within my own practice. Basically I’m against boredom, but I also want to make the best work humanly possible. So sometimes I’m willing to be pedantic if it means that the work will be better, but I can’t stay in that state for too long because my desire for experimentation and learning new things is too strong. I want to stay open and loose. It is no good to kill yourself in order to make the perfect painting. I tend to throw a spanner in the works from time to time when I find myself getting too serious.

What are you working on at the moment?

There are some new paintings developing in the studio. I’m not exactly sure where it is going yet but there are lots of big smears, scrapes, blotches and scratches. Very loose and wild. I’m working my way out of the pedantic technical prison I got myself into with the last body of work.

Who are some of your favourite living artists?

Alive: John Baldessari, Jordan Wolfson, Olafur Eliason, Raymond Pettibon, Wolfgang Tillmans. Not alive but not Modernist: Martin Kippenberger, Steven Parrino, Mike Kelley.

View more of Zander’s work at stevenson.info.