FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CTS is proud to present an encore presentation of American Male, over 20 works on paper and canvas by the American artist Jack Balas. A seductive playground of skin and sex, Balas’ nudes paint the walls of a romantic faux boudoir. Unveiled in eroticism, this visual device unlocks a raw and private portrait of masculinity, at once heroic and vulnerable.

Ask the typical 20's-something gym rat, and he'll tell you it ain't easy being beautiful these days. But with sweat, routine, dedication and maybe a little luck in the gene department, you too can become a Charles Atlas. Ask Jack Balas, Chicago-born artist and current resident of the American West (where cowboys and legends come from), and he'll tell you it ain't easy making beautiful paintings these days, especially with these jock-dude legends in the starring role. But with a recipe similar to theirs, that's exactly where he's been headed these past 30-odd years, pumping up his own Atlas of the New World with these dudes who, as Everyman, function in multiple roles: as epitome of the brains versus brawn divide, ringmaster of stylistic and iconographic disparity, narrator of stories both home and abroad, wide-ranging commentator and all-around Muse.

First the Atlas and ringmaster part: With an initially-unconscious nod to Gerhard Richter's opus of record-keeping, Balas has for years maintained that his work has something to do with maps -- the charting of territories and possible routes that allow passage among or between them. So there's a mix of imagery from varying sources -- personal, observed, photographed, imagined or appropriated. There are numbers and notations to be found, a bit like the annotations on the edges of maps or the backs of photographs, and the very largest canvases from the mid 1990's fold or roll up, while some are constructed of smaller pieces sewn together. But the spaces they depict are not necessarily seamless; rather, they can be layered or crudely juxtaposed; and there can be a range of styles, from attempts at traditional realism, to painterly gestural abstraction, to cartoon simplification -- all in the same picture plane, so that even if the space might be construed as unified, the mix of styles creates a visual dissonance. Beyond iconography, there are mixes of subject matter, words, stories, and emotions. Balas has said of this aspect of his work:

"I've numbered pieces sequentially since 2002, and sometimes stamp them with the dates I worked on them in an attempt to keep track of time, but also, perhaps, to consider that experience is cumulative and overlapping, embellished over the course of days and enriched by simultaneous, if discordant, ideas. Thus, all of the works become, in a sense, documents that, when compiled into a book or exhibition or globe, suggest reading from left to right, right to left, upside-down or inside-out. The beauty, hopefully, of interpreting such a construct, then, is that while I think I have laid a map out in front of you, it's up to you to build bridges between disparate ideas, and I cannot guess where you might choose to go, or even which route you might take."

Back in the 1980's and 90's, Balas was taking us across a lot of landscape, much of it located somewhere in the American West. Based in Los Angeles for four years, he had a job driving an art-delivery truck from coast to coast, on a route that took him between artists, galleries, collectors and museums, winding from San Francisco to L.A., Santa Fe, Dallas, Chicago and New York, with many points in between. At that time, paintings in both full-color and monochromatic oil on canvas focused on renditions of snapshot-based imagery, layered over with visual texts. The subject matter throughout was landscape or society's intrusions upon it, as well as our trip through it in many guises.