Notes

2016 marked a pivotal moment of chromatic and compositional exploration for Zander Blom within his broader abstract practice. This untitled painting exemplifies his New Paintings period, distinguished by raw canvas backgrounds disrupted by dense, almost geological accumulations of pigment.

With its distinctive bands of colour, most notably the swirling strata of blue, red, yellow, and green, this piece demonstrates the artist’s ongoing interest in the visual friction between modernist flatness and painterly excess. Blom’s use of layered impasto and unpredictable patterns invokes the gesture of action painting, while also suggesting a digital glitch aesthetic, a tension he often exploits to destabilise form.

The presence of unpainted zones, tonal smears, and scattered gestural marks reflects the artist’s resistance to closure or finality in his compositions. These works were often created with custom tools – palette knives, syringes, even repurposed household items ­ allowing the artist to disrupt traditional brushwork and embrace a more sculptural surface.

As a whole, this work stands as a bold example of Blom’s evolving abstraction, capturing the dynamic interplay between spontaneity, control, and the painter’s body as an expressive force.