Dike, B: Drinks

Dike Blair finds the subjects for his pictures by taking a careful look at fixtures of the world around him, focusing on details that are often hardly arresting. His repertoire of motifs is not limited to architectural elements, but he has deliberately kept it limited, employing repetition as a conceptual strategy. In addition to the architectural depictions, recurrent motifs in his oeuvre include still lifes-often of cocktails and arrangements that suggest the interior of a bar-as well as landscapes, flowers and women's eyes.Blair first explored the possibilities of gouache painting more than thirty years ago. As he honed his skills in this technique-gouaches, like watercolor paintings, a closely related genre, are always executed on paper-he gradually shifted his practice from working en plein air to painting from memory and eventually devised a characteristic studio practice in which he creates his paintings based on his snap shots. He sometimes manipulates his photographs and selects the most striking details-a good picture does not necessarily make for an interesting painting-usually working in a small format that derives from the size of commercially available watercolor paper. Blair paints in an almost photorealistic style, executing his pictures with subtlety and precision. The works on display attest to his interest in light and its reflection and his fascination with translucent materials such as glass and water. Delicate transitions and nuances between bright and dark, the mutations of colors between areas of light and shadow, and the almost imperceptible gradients they engender are the true focus of his paintings as well as his sculptures. Created for Blair's exhibition at the Secession, the wall elements on which his sculptures are based are painted in hazes of color, revealing subtle gradations only to the attentive eye.Endowing his sculptural pieces with painterly traits and collapsing the distinction between art object and pictorial medium, Blair