John Baldessari at Marian Goodman

For this show at Marian Goodman, I was surprised to see such muted color for an artist who is know for bold colors and graphic prints. Instead, I found a very modern collection almost entirely in hues of black, grey and white depicting different situations or scenes. These portraits, as they might be perceived, are varied and include everything from "Duck and Chair" to "Foot, cast, person, crutch and Santa Claus". The show ran concurrently with an exhibition called “Pure Beauty” at the Met Museum. I didn’t make it uptown to the Met, but it was a very academic show, highlighting the full breadth of the artists work. These new works at Goodman were a wonderful, new interpretation of the artists historical pieces.

I first fell in love with Baldessari at ABMB last year, when Mixografia highlighted a few of his works including 2009’s A B C Art (Low Relief): A/Ant, Etc. (Keyboard). The piece was a collection of the 26 letters of the English alphabet laid out like a computer keyboard. Each “key” had an accompanying picture that started with the letter – a match for M, peas for P, sushi for S and my favorite, a noose for N. The piece was at the same time, playful and dark and the images he choose were simple everyday pieces crafted in a beautiful way, but enough about that...

The works here, in comparison, were muted. All had a light grey base for the canvas and white was used to express a person or object. This base grey color transformed the works into modern minimalist pieces. Then once the outline of  a cast or a bird was added, the works really came together. They spoke to our understanding of an object or being and how we interrupt that imagery. The fact that the pieces were void of any bring colors and had this gray background streamlined your mind and caused you to focus on the image and how you relate to it. Whereas busy prints with a lot of color might be distracting, the simplistic forms of these works forced you to question your perception and understand of these concepts. Often the objects placed together seemed not to relate to one another – why a duck on a chair? But then, you start to build your own story and that’s where the artists leaves you in our own imagination. This is one time the gallery and I were on the same page. From their press release:

This exhibition presents a group of paintings from a new series titled Sediment, which marks a departure for the artist whose work over the last four years was focused primarily on the isolation of bodily features, unexpected fragments, and uncanny hybrids – noses & ears, elbows & legs, eyebrows & foreheads-- which served to demonstrate the subjective nature of representation. Sediment continues this tendency in Baldessari’s work and his immersion in thinking about totality – what is a part, what is a whole, and what is left to chance and choice in the determination of visual memory. The Sediment works contain fragments, traces, and silhouettes in graphic simplicity in black, white, and grey. More reductive in form and content, minimal contours on a single plane replace what was heretofore disparity between relief and ground. Shapes selected from photographs and overlaid with acrylic paint allude to figures and objects in juxtaposition both recognizable and not, in short, as the artist says, to the remnants or “residue after everything has been strained out…. What is left is the art.”