Jack Balas is seeking questions to life's big answers, and it’s no wonder that he surrounds himself with some of the most beautiful men to inspire him along the way. In his European solo debut at Ego Gallery in Barcelona, Spain, Balas's exhibition “American Male” brings together thirty works that celebrate the heroic and yet simultaneously vulnerable male figure.

Born in Chicago in the late 1950's when America saw extraordinary social change, Jack was a student of art’s evolution from the 1970’s forced-march of severe minimalism to the 1980’s post-modernist pluralism, when anything became possible.

Early in his career Jack focused on painting landscape imagery and our constructed environment. He liked to talk about formal concerns: painting as map or diary linking visual and verbal, conceptual and material, fact and fiction, abstraction and representation. While all this remains true, with the paintings he makes today he would say that, given how many images we are all bombarded with via the media every day, he is simply interested in making memorable ones. And indeed he does.

Over the last several years the male figure has taken center stage in his works. Rife with associations that can still invoke powerful taboos in contemporary culture, the images have ancient roots in idealized notions of beauty, truth, and form. But his "Studio Men," as he refers to his models, are able to shape-shift at the same time into a variety of emotional, political and stylistic scenarios -- contexts in which they function as everyman.

Gingerly moving paint across a surface, Jack is able to bend and flex oils and enamels in the most fluid of ways. Color compositions that are complex, soft and tender display intimately the male form, whether nude or clothed. Throughout his work, especially those on paper such as from the MUSE/Museum Series (2006-09) and Tattoo Detour: Drawings from Honolulu (2007-08), the viewer is baited into stealing long glances into what feels like a private journal, what with its unabashed display of scribbled margins and the occasional private phone number, seeming to record moments, thoughts and aspirations of an artist searching.

In an altogether and decisively different approach in works such as The Long History (2008), Navy's Romeo (2008), and Base (2008), the artist creatively toys with the illustrative, almost animation-like techniques of a graphic novelist, marrying them to a measured and controlled hand of traditional realism, with a few art-historical references thrown in to boot. Jack intensifies his tone and lavishes rich color in broad gestural strokes across the canvas, sweeping you up and into the moment, allowing you to participate or merely watch. Thus he is able to breathe fresh air into a timeless subject, making the figure brand new, memorable and sexy.

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With the support of CTS and Ego gallery a bi-lingual, full color, 40 page catalogue has been produced for this exhibition. Please click here or contact the gallery for purchase.

about the artist: Jack Balas is interested in recontextualizing images of men in a variety of emotional, political and stylistic scenarios -- contexts in which they function as everyman. Born in Chicago in 1955, Jack Balas received his BFA and MFA from Northern Illinois University, DeKalb. He was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Fellowship in Painting in 1995. His work is in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, New York City; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Tucson Museum of Art, among others.