THE PRESENCE OF ABSENCE

dodo dayao

Allan Balisi likes to scratch at the surface of things – – -mostly surfaces of his own making.

He digs a lot, Allan. Rummages, pores, sifts. He’s like a boy detective looking for clues. Mostly in old family photographs from before he was even born. He’s haunted by a past that isn’t necessarily his but in many ways is. It’s the primordial muck from which he emerged. And he’s haunted to the point of obsession. The photographs are beautiful and mysterious and arcane. And what he finds, he re-purposes as art that is even more beautiful and mysterious and arcane.

He paints from fragments of borrowed memory, piecing together a tableau that blurs all the lines of territory and ownership that kept one and the other at a remove. Here is his tentative present – – -and he scrapes away at the thin and vague and nervy layers of pigment with both ranbaxy viagra a forensic determination and a randomness given over to fate. Just like the way you would if picking on a scab. It’s like any process of investigation, the peeling off of layer after layer after layer to get to the bottom of both the metaphorical mystery of where he came from and the existential dilemma of where he ended up.

The absence in its wake becomes the presence in the work.

Connections from disconnections, wholes from fragments, truths from fictions, fictions from truths.

It all has the unmistakable tang of meta. Bio-fiction, if you will. Painting as long form storytelling. And nostalgia here is merely aura, prefab and transferable, but no less genuine for it.

Allan Balisi is still scratching at the surface of things – – – but the new show feels like a breaking away from old mores.

There’s another layer of absence here, that is, a new layer of presence- – – look closer.

Nearly all the works are bereft of people, let alone family, missing not so much signs of life but more signs of occupancy.

The disheveled shirt hanging from a nail on the wall in Phantoms And Empty Space Same As Ever. The forest fire dissipating into a benign fugue in In A Burning Winding Sheet We Lie. The black tree piercing an indistinct landscape in And Somewhere Else, The Tea Is Getting Cold. The masterless dog in Picking Gold On The Street.

It smacks of a parade of vacancies, of trails gone cold, abandonments. Only shot through with this eerie but pungent calm.

Outside of the fact that he continues to strip-mine old photographs for surplus, Balisi insists the new show is a cetirizine and viagra departure of sorts in that each piece is a self-contained universe with virtually no membranes of connection between them – – -at least none that are readily apparent and none that are readily narrative.

They are all aspects of him – – the drowning car in War Came At Dawn’s Greed is like his metaphor for insomnia, the nights when no sleep would come and the days he would lose in a haze of catch-up slumber, the battle to regain equilibrium, this is what it feels like to be alive and dead at the same time – – -and maybe there’s a strand in each one to pick up, no matter how obscure. Or maybe not.

But you can’t help but get the sense of a collective throb to all of them – – -one of an almost defiant and willful exile, an embracing of solitude.

The family history had been a cocoon to spin himself in and spin his art from, a co-dependency almost. Cabin fever was bound to set in. And a time would come that would feel right for severing ties. Goodbye to the old dependencies, hello to none. The difference between being alone and being lonely. Dispersal and release towards a kind of standalone existence. Escape.

Only the escape that the pair of women’s shoes and cloche hat evoke in A Means of Escape is less about seclusion and disappearance and more about discarding and engagement – – – the ground beneath your bare feet, the wind in your hair.

That’s what the show’s cryptic title – – –We Need No Fire To Warm Us – – -alludes to and it doesn’t come as a surprise that the work that bears the same name is one of only two that reference a photograph from the family archive and the only one with people in it – – -mother and son, in this case, his grandmother and his uncle, both of whom he never knew and http://canadianpharmacy-norxdrugs.com/ both of whom are severely cropped to preserve their anonymity to him, which is crucial, maintaining the push and pull of blood and distance, keeping the relatives strangers, connective and removed at the same time. Otherwise, escape just isn’t possible.

Went Up A Hill, Came Down A Mountain is the one other work that references a family photograph, this time a long shot of a mountaintop on which you can barely make out buy viagra online usa four figures , a quartet of priests on holiday apparently ,one of which was cialis 30 coupon another uncle, all but vanished in the painted version, the mountain now gone stark and stoic against that blasted gray sky, the severity of the exclusion deepening both the severity of the disconnection and the severity of the desire to reach that peak but without following anybody’s footsteps up its trails.

No man is an island but maybe he could be a mountain.

And maybe that’s where Allan Balisi is bound to end up, in that ghostly white tent nestled in a mountain hollow in Across The Whole Gray World Of Them, alone at last and lost in the presence of absence.