Air-Tight

Jerrold Ballaine

In an article in Artforum magazine from 1970, critic Palmer D. French wrote about current shows of various San Francisco artists, one being an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art featuring Jerrold Ballaine, Fletcher Benton, and Sam Richardson. French addressed Ballaine's three dimensional plastic sculptures, titled the Air Tight series:

'Mr. Ballaine was represented by 20 vacuum-formed-plastic wall plaque reliefs from his 1969 Air Tight series. While the plastic shell plaque format has engaged Ballaine for some time this recent work propounds the simplest unit shapes he has yet devised. In form these square pillow-like shapes, often “quilted” by a lateral indentation into two or more transverse pods, tend to resemble segments of an inflated air mattress. In basic hue and texture the processed plastic material as Ballaine employs it would seem to be of a cloudy opalescence, like smooth frosted glass...'

It appears that this color lithograph either predated or was complementary to these sculptural works, exhibiting the same sense of voluminous, soft material subjected to a composition of formal shapes. Though he didn't work extensively in lithography, Ballaine's grasp of the technique is still expert, with smooth tonality and the use of reflective pigment to form depth against the flat, ivory negative space.