Karma presents an exhibition of new oils and gouaches by Dike Blair, open from September 7 to October 26, 2024, at 22 East 2nd Street.

For nearly four decades, Blair has made realist paintings based on his own photographs. Rather than painting from snapshots of his travels, as he has many times in the past, here he focuses on visual phenomena occurring within a fifty-yard radius of his Catskills home and studio, namely skies, rendered in gouache, and his swimming pool, in oil.  

These paintings of sky and water never veer into abstraction, rather, they are always recognizable representations of an environment. His skies are numerous, varied, and sensitively observed. In one, a sugar-spun cloud rises from the treetops into a perfectly flat, cerulean plane made both matte and silky as only gouache can; in another, the moon’s glow adulterates an inky sky into lighter, watery passages. Chemtrails, the moon and stars, or a single crack of lightning mark the heavens as such, and Blair anchors his relatively empty expanses with slices of horizon, branches and leaves, or even his house. His backyard pool reflects its surroundings during the day and glows mysteriously in the evening. Its four sides echo the window frames that structured his earlier paintings of sky.

Blair describes these works as containing “a fair amount of nothingness.” This nothingness is the pleasure of dissolving the self into the atmosphere, being lulled by the hum of the automated pool cleaner propelling itself through the water, having a cocktail as the sun sinks behind a mountain ridge on the horizon. 

While he has said that “irony is practically unavoidable” for someone of his generation, these recent works push his realist practice further into sincerity, evacuating whatever irony was left over from the postmodern era in which he came of age as an artist. With this new body of work, Blair asserts his unironic mastery of his medium.