Bad Maps, Blake Rayne’s second one-person exhibition at Galeria Nuno Centeno, comprises ten new works painted while in residency in Arles, France and constructed in Porto, continuing his ongoing series of folded, painted and sewn assemblages.
Blake Rayne’s practice has evolved over the past two decades through a sustained investigation and intervention into the cultural conditions of painting’s production, exhibition, and distribution. Embedded in the works throughout Bad Maps is a concerted effort to disrupt and displace the constricted range of temporal experience within established regimes of normative clock-time.
Against the internalization of rigidly uniform and linear temporal orders that work to optimize social activity in the name of efficiency and production, Rayne deploys inherited and invented tactics of aesthetic abstraction to enliven insubordinate and alternative temporalities. Through their realization and exhibition as completed works, these tactics become cognitive and sensory technologies for countering the pervasive enclosure and dispossession of time, which must by necessity involve a correlated elaboration of obscured and excluded spatial terrains. Emphasizing rather than subverting the cultural efficiency of painting itself, Rayne’s distinct sensibility for developing and combining artistic operations centered around the fold realizes an unruly poetics imbued with an abundance of motion, a performance of time otherwise that rejects any austerity plan on the imaginary.
Sharing variations on the title Swamp Sheaf, these works contribute to an attitude and activity moving beyond binary notions of abstraction and representation toward porous modes of mixing and hybridity-swamping. Their accentuation of the fold and the cut further exceeds the generic boundaries of painting through an incorporation of the qualities of filmic montage. The interplay of folded canvas, painted surface, and sewn line across the exhibited works endeavors to produce an emergent, heterogeneous cartography capable of registering precise artistic intention while remaining an aperture for unexpected formal connections and unforeseen routes of signification.
He studied at the California Institute of the Arts, and was the Director of Graduate Studies at Columbia University’s School of Visual Arts from 2003 to 2009. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Artists Space, SculptureCenter, The Kitchen, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Künstlerhaus, Graz; Bergen Kunsthall; and the Blaffer Art Museum, Houston. Rayne’s paintings are held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, FRAC Poitou-Charentes, the Portland Museum of Art and the Pinault Collection, among others.