Dike Blair at Feature Inc, Frieze Magazine, September 2013
Approaching the art of Dike Blair is no ordinary task. His work is monumental and oblique, sleek and detail oriented, and it maintains its distance from any standard aesthetic response. The works in Blair's recent solo exhibition were two sculptural installations paired with a series of gouache paintings. Hard Shadows (2012) and Dance Dance Dance (2011) are comprised of a pair and a trio of packing crates, which are painted white and then used as both the container and the support structure for a set of abstract gouache paintings on paper. The psychedelic qualities of his paintings alternately reference transcendental mysticism, Modernist architecture, and the suggestively idealistic abstract imagery most commonly associated with iTunes Visualizers, which set whichever music is being played to a randomly generated depiction of imagined cosmological phenomena. Blair is interested in creating a visual event that transforms into a visceral one. As we look at the gouache that