Sydney Blum. Icarus-Colour-Space

About

The ways in which the grids, colors and shapes are composed make you feel as if you are about to take off. This is where the title of the exhibition comes in. Icarus is, of course, the figure in Greek myth whose father fashioned wings of feathers and wax so that they could escape imprisonment on an island. Icarus, young and full of life, skateboarded through the sky, as it were. Yet in spite of his father’s warnings, he flew too near the sun, the wax on his wings melted, and he fell to his death.

Sydney Blum has used the idea of Icarus flying towards the sun as the impetus of her new work. Here, she attempts to describe and create the motion and sensation of flying but in solid form: an incongruity that is not lost on her. She juxtaposes and distorts colors and lines and shapes in such ways as to produce seemingly contradictory vibrating waves of energy in our consciousness. We see the form, the suggestion of a wing, a shield, an expanding and contracting grid underlaid with gradations of color. The flight that draws us through this complex undulating interplay of color, shapes, shadows and light takes us somewhere else. Towards the sun, perhaps. Into the unknown, certainly.