Three Elements

“What I am after,” said Bladen, “is to create a drama out of a minimal experience.” His pared-down sculptures reference the “less is more” aesthetic of minimalist art from the 1960s and 1970s, which aimed to distill art to its most essential forms, ridding it of content, emotion, and symbolism. But Bladen’s work may not be as drained of meaning as minimalism’s purists require. Instead, the tilted, precariously balanced threesome might suggest a band of walking or dramatically leaning figures or a procession of majestic monoliths on the march whose falling forward has been suspended at the last moment before collapse—an unsettling equilibrium.