Mel Bochner "Blah Blah Blah" Solo Exhibition of Paintings

Contemporary alternative conceptual art painting Complain 160x119.4x4.4cm 2010 Mel Bochner "Blah Blah Blah" solo exhibition: May 29 to July 31 at Nelson-Freeman Gallery. Mel Bochner (born 1940) is one of the pioneers of American 1960s conceptual art and the first artist to introduce text into visual art. Mel Bochner has consistently questioned the inherent nature of artworks and their mechanical presentation, utilizing various media such as photography, installation, film, and painting. His artistic creation embodies philosophical, grammatical, and mathematical thinking, expressing his concepts through linguistics and numbers within relationships of meaning and sensation. It is constructed between text and awareness, content and material objects, concepts and real objects, and feeling and imagination.

Mel Bochner presents the "Thesaurus Painting" text series developed since 2004. Using synonyms from dictionaries, he creates a remarkable textual auditory echo presented on contrasting color fields, reinforcing the graphic and imaginative aspects of the text. The artist states: "The function of color highlights that the text is equivalent to its feeling." The theme for new works in 2010 is the "Blah Blah Blah" series; under expressive contrasting colors, the artist constructs the main body of the painting using this continuous combination of "Blah." He condenses this text into a rhythmic onomatopoeia; words become sound, and the feeling of the text disappears in repetition. In this new series, what Mel Bochner offers is the viewing of painting where text becomes graphic, losing its own meaning and painting form, making their function and information even more ambiguous. The artist explains: "Finally, what interests me is the unsuitability of the entire language system, more precisely not what is said here, but what cannot be said there."