The Knapp Gallery continues its tradition of First Friday openings and welcomes James Bloom in his latest body of paintings Social Phobia. Bloom is deemed by most aficionados as an Outsider Folk Artist. A social reactionary creating intuitive social commentary, Bloom's imagery has received international acclaim, showing from the Hamptons in New York to Aubagne, France.
Born in Allentown, Pennsylvania in 1968, Jim resides now in Philadelphia. Creating intense visual art inseparable from personal experiences, his human interaction, relationships, gender, sexuality and the mental health system, Bloom shares his interests in film, story-telling, and the visual languages of his culture. Wanting his pointed imagery to function like the movement of television, capturing the eye, quickly conveying messages and feeling, Bloom's efforts highlight the power of line, light and gestural simplicity.
Signature drawings and collage styles honed since childhood, reached new poignancy in 2001, after the artist sustained serious injuries in a car accident. Bloom, diagnosed with a neurological movement disorder, began a new path. Tableau rasa, nurtured by latent subconscious, reinvented Bloom's self portraits and social landscapes. Biting wit and irony driven by random text offsets Bloom's fields of patterned abstraction. Brilliant color and shapes balance intuitively within overlapping gestural line and form.
Content driven, Bloom artfully, succinctly sometimes cryptically communicates his dark often bitter realities through raw and honest situational vignettes. Got anger, resentment and disappointment? Got the Blues? Bloom's transparency invites us to participate, to heal, and to ready ourselves for life's unpredictability. Just as the storytelling and timbre of early Blues music shaped Rock and Roll as we know it, Bloom's authentic intimacy redefines a cosmopolitan perspective of Contemporary Folk Art.