Over the last 20 years, Blake Rayne’s work has been central to questioning, contributing, and putting to test contemporary beliefs regarding painting. The pictorial practice of Blake Rayne develops in the mid-1990s, a moment of historical acceleration, in which a new economy of network communication emerged based upon the principles of speed and spectacle transforming the relationship between work and leisure. The conditions of cultural production are modified through the implementation of forms of flexible self-managerial labor, producing new forms of social power based on the capture and control of time and experience. Rayne’s work tests how painting is responding to shifts in perceptual regimes, labor conditions, and temporal paradigms. Painting has no essence outside of its historical models, thus gathering and dispersing itself at every moment. On that premise, Rayne works on and through the technologies and institutions of painting, placing its conditions of possibility into relief. Rayne’s practice is an ongoing act of revision that creates a catalog of processes and operations. Through this constantly evolving catalog, he produces a discursive and material strategy that creates a plastic interplay between art and the social. Rayne’s work is included in various public collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He has taught extensively over the last ten years, including, most recently, as Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at Columbia University, NY.
