Some shows blow, but this one sucks.

The show is a black hole after all. Seriously, it sucks you in. Allan Balisi’s “Black Hole” turns the gallery that houses it into an all-devouring pseudo-cosmic non-entity—a space that is a non-space, even an anti-space—& one’s falsely romantic notions of black holes drag him/her unwittingly toward incomprehensible entropy. It’s in this sense that one wonders why blurbs meant to entice or incite mindless consumption (as in the blurbs of paperbacks) say, This is great, it’ll suck you in like a black hole between covers, when there is nothing pleasurable about black holes.

Rather, what these notes say is you are under observation here. Strict observation. That you are being watched the way a prisoner is being watched. Given the conceit that the gallery is a black hole, one may be tempted to conclude that the seeming diversity of these canvases—from flowers to fathers, from fixtures in the household to the house itself—is proof that black holes suck in anything & everything they can. But each painting is no mere victim unwittingly drawn into the vacuum; instead, each painting is itself a prison—a prison where audience is prisoner, isolated & lonely like Balisi’s house despite its drape of breezy sky. Four edges = four walls. This gallery is “where [you] will always be.” Welcome to event horizon.

Enamored by the visual lyric, you are led into the solitude of incarceration as a crime of passion leads you to incarceration: Each painting lures into the solitary mood(/doom) of meditation, & in this vulnerable aloneness you are faced with the inability to recount your exact experience to your fellow prisoner. “[H]e is the object of information, never a subject in communication,” said Michel Foucault. But whose object of information?

The Panopticon’s, of course. This central structure of authority that keeps all prisoners in check, “induc[ing] in the inmate a state of conscious & permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.” It is Art & the cultural sedimentation it has acquired over the centuries, a phantasmatic father-like figure (no wonder Bentham’s design of the original panopticon was a tower, a staggering phallus unabashedly cyclopic in its feigned omniscience), Oedipal in its imposition of fear of transgression &/or escape. Behold this painting & glean from it much sadness—sadness because its textures are somber, sadness because it is what the self as painter has been expressing all along. Painting as self-expression, the painted canvas a medium for catharsis: This is what Art wants you to feel, & you are caged by its expectant gaze. A little boy w/ no mind of your own, you wear “[your] father’s sense & [your] big brother’s pants.”  Continued...