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Manager of Adult Public Programs at
The Whitney Museum of American Art
Jeffrey Coploff Fine Arts
New York
2003
For the viewer frustrated with the untitled tag of so much contemporary art, Steve Baris' new
painting series
(including Landscapes with Clumps & Trickles, Landscape with Random Clusters, and Landscape
with Assorted
Blots) delight in their accuracy. Here indeed are random clusters of red and orange and blue and
gray (Random
Clusters #18) and assorted blots of white and yellow on a lava-like red (Assorted Blots #1). And trickles?
Dispersed across a monochromatic field, punctuated with its own off-hued squares, the groupings spread and
fall like
tetris-like rain. In Clumps & Trickles #8, an autumnal palette of gold and orange squares vie for floor
space with black
and white, the resulting pattern of boxy colors against a modulating wash suggesting not only
geometry but joy.
The landscapes suit their jaunty names, and the evocations of movement, flash and speed
suggest the best of artificial
worlds: the dance hall, the party, the street.
To viewers familiar with Baris, the new work can surprise. Gone is the austerity of his previous 2001 series,
Depth of Field. In those
oils on Plexiglas,thin earth-toned fields appear in daubs or squares, often coalescing
into a moonlike terrain. Superimposed on this
alien landscape are irregular patterns of small red and larger white
circles, themselves suggesting nodes, settlements or points of interest.
A futuristic map, only one without any
key to roads, interchanges or exits. And this confusion takes another turn as a viewer realizes
two-dimensions
have become three, the white circles opening up into holes bored into the inch-thick Plexiglas.
But like Depth of Field, the new Landscapes can't but recall the artist's background, environment, and spatial
interests. Raised on remote
Indian reservations in the American West, currently living in the sprawl of Eastern
suburbia, Baris approaches the picture plane in the way
he approaches such disparate locales: through
disorientation. Unlike a traditional painted scene, an empty geography offers little
differentiation in fore, middle,
or backgrounds. Earth blends into sky, and there are no landmarks. Similarly, Baris has described
the experience
of suburbia -seen all too frequently from a moving car- in terms of visual A.D.D: driving through generic street
scenes,
the eye Òlingers at no particular location yet skirts many.Ó It's hard to compose any hierarchy. The
result, he explains,
is a Òprofound dispersal of attention,Ó an inability to locate the significant points (much less
one's self) along the way.
In the new work, small shapes spread out like subdivisions and strip-malls. No one thing commands attention;
the balanced clumps
and clusters leave the eye free to roam. And what does it find everywhere? Color. The rich
orange of Landscape: Pell-Mell.
The dense play of red on yellow on green in Clusters & Trickles #2. The dancing
spots of blue, yellow, and green on the richest
orange -so like a city at sunset- of Random Clusters #17. The
landscape as dappled screen, as honky-tonk quilt, as construction
paper collage. Like Baris' artistic hero
Stuart Davis, the figure whom the new work so vividly recalls, these are vernacular American scenes,
transformed
via formal beauty. ÒI paint what I see in America,Ó Davis believed, and in his canvases signage and cigarettes
become new objects,
compelling in their own right. Baris' work, similarly, takes up generic sprawl and remakes
as a magical pattern all its own. Grids and boxes,
the new American landscape, anonymous but improbably redeemed.
Almost. For the new Landscapes can't quite shake that feeling of uncertainly, that failure to know where we are and
what is what. Even caught
up in the complements and contrasts of the colored shapes against the color fields, there
is a moment of pause. Where do I look? What do I see?
Another very American scene: the decision to get into the car
and just drive, out there, anywhere. The first hint of teenage freedom. But if Steven Baris'
new work reaches for such
exuberance, it also recalls its partner: anxiety. In the vast and empty and interchangeable spaces, one can always
get lost.
The risk ensures the beauty.