Garde Rail Gallery - Outsider Art - Folk Art

Outsider Art - Self-Taught Art - Folk Art

February 18 - 24, 2004

VISUAL ARTS PICKS
GREGORY BLACKSTOCK

I'll admit I eavesdropped on the autistic "outsider" artist Gregory Blackstock at his opening reception. This was after I'd circled the gallery several times, enamored by the tidy rows and columns of his expressively drawn visual lists of related objects like tools, airplanes, shoes, and even wasps. The vivid inner logic of Blackstock's forms has something in common with the slanting, crystalline worlds of medieval illuminated manuscripts, as well as with Agnes Martin's obsessive graphite grids. I overheard his gleeful reply to a question about whether he had a favorite among his drawings. "Yes!" he exclaimed—it was his drawing of our state's "king-size" prisons and jails. A few days later, I stumbled upon this perfectly apt quote from art critic Rosalind Krauss: "The grid is...a prison in which the caged artist feels at liberty."
ELISE RICHMAN

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