Sungazers

Jimmy Baker’s second exhibition at Shaheen Gallery consists of mid- and large-scale paintings that he has produced over the past 18 months, and a group of ten small-scale paintings that he has completed over the past 6 months. The mid- and large-scale works that appear in the exhibition find Baker venturing further into the visual and thematic territory that he first staked out in his 2012 exhibition at SHAHEEN, and continuing to employ and further develop the unique and complex multi-layered working process by which he has produced most of his paintings of the past 5 years. To begin his working process, Baker lays down 2-3 layers of paint to create large compositional elements and divide pictorial space. From there, he culls hundreds of images from a wide variety of sources and arranges them in Photoshop to form a dense collage, which he then reduces until clear forms take shape. Baker then returns to the canvas, where he typically applies 3-7 additional layers of paint that both riff off of and work against aspects of the collage and form a dense painterly surface. After that, the entire canvas is run through a large format digital printer, where portions of the digital collage are printed overtop the accumulated paint. To complete the painting, Baker sands, glazes, pours, scrapes and brushes paint over the entire surface of the work to synthesize the printing into the painted layers. Although the artist utilized the same process to create the recent group of small-scale paintings that appear in the current exhibition, these new works also incorporate additional processes and materials, such as direct transfer printing and spray painting. While they are characterized by the same blurred lines and internal slippages between media and material application and as the mid- and large-scale paintings in the show, Baker’s smaller paintings are marked by willfully clearer visual and compositional demarcations.

Although strong conceptual and thematic consistencies course through Baker’s entire body of work to date, the visually dense and cacophonous paintings that comprise Sungazers are marked by their materiality; visual profusion; bright, acidic palette; looser application of paint; heightened tension between image and object, and representation and abstraction that stand in stark visual contrast to the tightly rendered portraits and landscapes that defined Baker’s earlier work. Impastoed surfaces intermingle and fuse with over- and underlying digitally printed imagery and tight, almost photo-realistic passages of paint, as vestiges of figures and other representational elements emerge from and recede into fields of gestural, painterly mark making. The dense juxtaposition and collision of imagery that drives Baker’s working process and resulting paintings echoes and embodies a logic of non-linear thinking that permeates current modes of information exchange, visual production and consumption. As Baker pushes the visual overload to the point of collapse and destruction, the paintings begin to echo the often perilous real world tensions, power struggles, and models of infinite economic growth that have driven recent global political, cultural and environmental events and defined history at the onset of the 21st century.