Robert Bordo
[9][43][44] In his early work, Bordo sought to integrate an abstract painting language with subject matter and metaphors related to landscape, social narratives, modernism, and his personal history as a Canadian and Montrealer living in New York.
[7][38] The former works employ ghostly, hand-painted, empty speech bubbles set against monochrome white or gun-metal gray backgrounds—an iconic reference to speechlessness during the height of the AIDS crisis.
He rendered the images in quiet, carefully limited palettes and a no-frills manner without descriptive detail, then overlapped them in loose grids or clustered constellations over unmodulated, matte grounds (e.g., Lookout, 1999; Back Seat, 2003).
"[4] New York Times critic Grace Glueck termed them reticent "mindscapes"—generalized impressions of landscape that others equated to links in the associative chain of private thought and emotions, elusively suggesting the possibility of resolution into coherent subjects or sites.
[4][7] With exhibitions at Alexander and Bonin, Rubicon Gallery (Dublin) and Mummery + Schnelle (London) between 2005 and 2009, Bordo departed from multi-image postcard works, producing some of his most, understated, abstract paintings.
[5][6][47] In simple, frontal works, he distilled a sense of light, space and place into a minimum of color and surface incident—brushy, wet-into-wet stretches of mint, blue or taupe overlaid with dots, daubs, tiny brushstrokes, or slabs—pushing the limits of suggestive representation (e.g., Another Day, 2005).
[39][5] Art in America's Stephen Maine wrote that the "muted colors and veiled imagery" evoked an understated theatrical quality of intrigue that prompted viewers "to hang on every painterly syllable … drawn into what seems like an artworld subplot.
[3][10][44][11] Artforum's Barry Schwabsky wrote that these paintings left behind the more delicate, lyrical touch of the landscape works, "evince[ing] a Gustonesque brusqueness and spleen… with a blunter, more robust facture and a more implacable presence.
[48][3][10][44] In the "Windshield" paintings, Bordo continued to engage characteristic interests in visual and tactile pleasure, flatness and depth, conflating the picture plane with the windscreens of cars often depicted driving through unpredictable, rainy weather with active wipers (e.g., Dial, The Future, both 2012).
[49][9][44] These paintings typically employed a complex sense of space, with overlaps, splits, doublings, changes of scale, and expressive horizontal and vertical lines suggesting journeys anticipated or recalled.
[44][50] Roberta Smith wrote that the thick, wet-on-wet paint handling, blurred transparencies and fractured spaces of broken center lines and red lights created "an effect that is deliciously and darkly comic, but also abstract and rather ham-handedly beautiful.
[37][38] In 2019 at Bortolami, Bordo exhibited his "crackup" paintings, which drew upon prior series by employing monochrome grounds and lines incised into wet, oil surfaces that appeared like broken window panes.
