Like a portmanteau word, Blair Thurman’s work brings together otherwise distinct worlds of meaning. While at the same time evoking Minimalist art, Pop art and Op art, it also reveals a new approach to abstraction: a subjective translation of the ambiguous equivalences between art and reality and vice versa. And yet, when one looks at the works – the shaped canvases, the neons, the installations – this syncretic aesthetic fills one with a sense of inevitability.

The shaped canvases are paintings and sculptures at the same time. They combine the shape of the stretcher and the pictorial quality of the canvas. The picture is an object and the support a pattern which the painting sometimes redraws. As in Frank Stella’s shaped canvases, the edges of the support seem to define its content, but Blair Thurman leaves the irregular lines of the painting visible. By means of this painterly effect he moves away from modernist neutrality and autonomy and makes a point of dirtying the canvas, making it ‘unclean’. The shaped canvases also often include openwork, and the more or less complex geometrical shapes of the openings create images in the blanks between, as well as on the canvas. An oval becomes a fan belt; a rectangle a road. This displacement had already taken place while observing reality: a racing circuit became a circle, part of a fighter plane became a triangle. At the beginning of 1990s, looking at the work of his friend Steven Parrino, Thurman experienced a formal breakthrough that coincided for him with a nostalgic and obsessional return of a personal imagery, in particular his passion since childhood for Hot Wheels cars and racing circuit models. Parrino used the word ‘deformalism’ for this integration of elements external to abstraction. Abstraction accepts its own ‘impurity’, its influence in aesthetic history, and the way it has been admitted into the ‘Society of Spectacle’. Reality on the other hand has been elevated to the status of image. With his ‘found abstraction’, Thurman is working the same seam of research as his friends John Armleder, Francis Baudevin, Stéphane Dafflon, Philippe Decrauzat, Olivier Mosset and Mai-Thu Perret. As, ‘The introduction of the expression “found abstraction”’, Vincent Pécoil wrote, ‘needs to be understood in the “appropriationist” context of the 1980s, which favoured a blurring of the distinction between abstract and figurative art.’1 With the arrival of the ‘ready-made’, the object moved into the field of art and became transformed into a work of art in itself; in 1960s Pop art, however, it was the artwork which incorporated the object and turned it, as an image, into a parody of the consumer society. In the 1980s, the modernist ideal was damaged and, in its place, a post-modern aesthetic and cultural dissonance asserted itself. The pictorial and symbolic domain of abstraction grew wider; the artwork and the object came together without a hierarchy. Formalism freed itself of its presumed autonomy and asserted its anti-pure syncretism. Artists re-appropriated a formal repertoire, which had already been dually integrated into art and into reality, and with it they produced an abstraction connected to reality – an ‘alrealdy’ abstraction. The association of abstraction with ordinary objects turns the ‘ready-made’ into a commonplace, and yet also reifies it. Blair Thurman utilises the formal emancipation that comes about through reification by combining abstract imagery with the imagery of the highway as a vocabulary for painting. His use and abuse of signs and symbols has become a signature. As for the titles of his works, they are ‘a means of creating familiarity and intimacy’2, a way of revealing the eclecticism of his references and combining dedications to his friends with his borrowings from popular culture and art history. They pile extra images onto the image of the artwork through tricks of language and double meanings. Thurman’s playful and libidinous titles – like American Sluts 2 (2009) or Kaliko Kat (2014) – are powerful evidence of his rejection of abstract purity, and they confer an anthropomorphic quality on his works. By giving them titles such as Mr. Black, Mrs. Pinky-Winky or Mr. Lincoln, Thurman personifies them, not altogether without humour, in his own image and in the image of the world around him.

Blair Thurman’s work occupies a place on the interface between painting and sculpture, abstraction and figuration, art and reality. Like a road sign pointing in two opposite directions and consequently pointing nowhere, it defies a single definition, reductive analysis, or would-be art-historical labels. The obvious ambiguity of his work opens up a dialogue between the realities of a personal and universal story, and allows for great freedom of interpretation – as if to demonstrate the ambivalent beauty of a world which is as depraved as it is virtuous. ‘The road which goes up and the road which comes down are the same road.’