SAUGERTIES, New York — In 1993, I reviewed Synthesis, an exhibition of 15 summary artists on the now-defunct John Good Gallery. In my assessment, I known as consideration to 2 artists who I believed stood out; one was David Baker, whose portray “Avatars of the Tortoise” (1990) caught my eye. In 1996, a distinguished New York Occasions artwork critic categorically dismissed the work in Baker’s third solo exhibition at Postmasters Gallery. Shortly afterward, Baker, who had parted methods together with his gallery, and his spouse, Joanne, left their rented loft in Jersey Metropolis and purchased a schoolhouse in Saugerties, the place they’ve lived ever since.
Since leaving New York Metropolis for the relative isolation of the Hudson Valley, Baker has explored the concentric circle motif in collage and portray. Whereas he has not exhibited his work since transferring to Saugerties, his movie Shadow, Seed, Spagyric was proven on the New York Movie Competition in 2011. All of this I realized after he launched himself to me throughout the intermission of a poetry studying I gave, together with artist and poet No Land, on the Woodstock Shivastan Poetry Ashram Bookshop in Woodstock, New York. By the tip of our dialog, we had professed our admiration for the ceramics of George Ohr, the self-proclaimed “Mad Potter of Biloxi,” and the poetry of Clark Coolidge and Robert Creeley, and deliberate a studio go to.
After I obtained to David’s studio, he started our go to by displaying me a black three-ring binder of xeroxed pages, every in a protecting sleeve. The primary xerox confirmed a concentric circle, which he defined was the idea of the work I used to be about to see. He used the xerox copy as a drawing, which he minimize up and reconfigured, utilizing elements of different copies of the identical picture. Baker’s concentric circle initially alluded to Marcel Duchamp’s “Rotary Demisphere (Precision Optics)” (1925) and Jasper Johns’s “Goal” work. Nonetheless, once I appeared on the work, I didn’t see a direct connection to those two artists. As a substitute, I remembered a observe that Johns wrote to himself in a 1964 sketchbook: “Take an object / Do one thing to it / Do one thing else to it. [Repeat.]”
With some analysis, I realized that Baker first gained consideration within the late Nineteen Eighties for work that appropriated from a variety of incongruous pictures, resembling roots, targets, anatomy, and chipmunk heads. Even then he used xeroxes to cohere the composition. He made his breakthrough across the time he misplaced gallery illustration, persevering with to work on this method, however decreasing his supply to the concentric circle. He took appropriation artwork, which had by then devolved into commonplace acts of quotation, citation, and parody, and set it in a brand new route.
Whereas explaining his course of to me, he advised me that he had studied Indigenous Rock Artwork in distant canyons of the Southwest United States, in addition to the structure of Andrea Palladio within the Veneto of Italy, and outsider artwork in Lausanne, Switzerland, which homes the Assortment de l’Artwork Brut. He added that Carl Schuster and Edmund Carpenter’s multivolume research Patterns That Join (1996) was “an abiding touchstone” for his work.
My consideration was first held by the palette of “Avatars of the Tortoise” (which I realized was a collective title of at the very least seven work carried out within the mid Nineteen Nineties). his work prompted me to ask him about his palette and his predilection for muted, intently valued colours. Baker advised me that these have been guided by his shade blindness to sure shades of crimson and inexperienced. No matter Baker’s motive for the colours he makes use of in his work, it additional set his work aside from different up to date artists.
In “She Knew No Different Method” (2023), Baker renders three overlapping pinched varieties, outlining them in thick grey paint. Muted blues and blue-greens fill lots of the shapes created by the varieties’ overlapping outlines, whereas a unique blue blended with grey in a single massive inside part offsets the sense of visible symmetry. For “Undulate (Vesica Piscis)” (2021), a ragged cerulean blue line composes a determine eight containing overlapping concentric circles. The ensuing inside form in every circle is named vesica piscis (“bladder of a fish”). 4 semicircles rising from the outer edges of the general type invite us to learn them as ears, whereas an undulating cerulean blue line snakes down the shape’s heart vertically. Your entire picture is ready in opposition to a cool grey floor. Whereas the configuration is derived from a xerox, all the things feels hand painted, with specific consideration paid to tone.
“The Ninth of Ninth” (2024) focuses on the conjoining and separation of varieties. Two vertical rectangular varieties abut one another, making a taut sense of visible rigidity between symmetry and asymmetry. The shapes are each completely joined and eternally distinct. A circle on the heart of every type incorporates additional round strains, whereas a bigger circle behind these divides the wholes into a number of elements.
Utilizing orange-red, soiled, brownish pink, umber, black, brown, and soiled white to outline every space in “The Ninth of Ninth,” Baker’s palette is each tonal and graphic. The curving bands are like increasing ripples, whereas the huge black line holds all the things in test. Though Baker’s work name forth associations with the underbelly of tortoises, optical gadgets, a slice of a geode, and far else, he all the time holds these references at bay. The work will not be about nature or artwork in itself, however about actively seeing, because the thoughts discovers connections and disconnections in his recombinant vocabulary of strains and shapes. They’re in regards to the pleasures of pondering and seeing and discovering connection, fundamental human actions which can be integral to curiosity. Collectively, these work represent a serious achievement that is still nearly utterly unknown. Baker has made an oeuvre the artwork world urgently wants.