Airom grew up in the Australian bush. Embarrassed about not owning a television, he would make up imaginary television shows to tell his school mates. This reliance on imagination played a big part to the development of his creative process.
Heavy oil paint with a series of transparent glazes and a subtle interplay of forming moods resulting in a soft organic surface as well as themes of fostering and nurturing, development thought formation, acquisition and growth are common to Airom’s work. His work is a balance between actual nature and desired nature, success and humility and social relationships. Airom’s process is to build a slow-motion cycle of thought-feeling interactions, he will create several sedimentary layers responding to thoughts as they form and different moods they evoke, and make this process visible, scumbling and glazing to reveal the history and interplay of one layer and the next, hoping to create a stirring a circling between sensation and contemplation in the viewer.
‘…a kind of assured hesitancy is common to all of Bleicher’s oil paintings…These are open-ended visual conundrums presented with a feeling of innocent pleasure…You can compare this art to surrealism… or Philip Guston’s later work but that is like hanging a tag or delimiting label on something primal, inherently itself and whole….These images are produced as a balancing act over the great divide between the conscious and unconscious mind… Their virtue is that they represent a freely ranging hybrid, unfinished and unaccountable.’
-Ray Zone, ArtScene Magazine
‘….seemingly spontaneous gestured, scumbled technique. The dynamic balancing of objects that leave open wide interpretations of the narrative. The richness of the layered colors enhance the deeply personal psychological themes. A primitive and at the same time sophisticated and elaborate world of stylized objects and beings playing out their interior visual games.’
-David Genovesi