John Baldessari
“Hot & Cold”
New York, 24 West 57th Street
Departing from the art historical canon to explore an entirely new subject matter, Baldessari focuses our attention on the physical world in this new body of work, featuring icons and events of natural phenomena which give new expression to the artist’s hybrid forms, exploring motif and ground and the relationship of painting to photography, image and language.
Intrigued by the activity and geometry of land masses, Baldessari abstracts visual conventions of landscape, playing with surface forms whose scope and scale provoke a sense of the sublime and the cataclysmic. Presented as diptychs, Hot & Cold unites polarities of surface and depth, chaos and containment, through counterpoints of subject, form and color, highlighting the dialectics of figure and ground, and positive and negative space. Moving from the single frame wherein he would work additively often compressing visual signifiers into one support, Baldessari’s new bifurcated form allows images to contest one another, allowing for an uneasy tension in their collision.
Through these symbolic inversions and transposition of fragments from landscape and photography, Baldessari creates a third reading in Hot & Cold with his application of found texts, taken from an encyclopedic collection of aphorisms and phrases.
on view through June 15, 2019
