Intimate Frontiers Catalogue

Excerpt
"Brett Baker’s introverted abstractions commit to surface, and to manipulating color space. Seeking a conceptual frontier that master mark-makers like Guston—who explored the metaphysical places “between presence and absence”—reveled in, the language of painting explores itself. Thick stripes assiduously accrue as though marking time without expectation. In Axel’s Forest, named after a Villiers play in which the protagonist chooses ideas over reality and death over treasure, close tonal ranges of complementary color in varied temperatures and saturations fluctuate mesmerizingly, opposing the order in which they fell in line. The image is tactile evidence, the fInal layer of a search that shields its motive. Baker says, “I often feel like I am painting the studio...walling up the space around me. In the smaller pictures I try to plug all of the deep space, the holes...get rid of any windows. I’m always trying to bring the paint in closer.” Hand venerates touch; the elemental image is confronted the way a cave painter might have marveled at his handprint."

"In Painter’s Table Baker pays homage to a familiar irony—discarded paint is merely home- less, never dirt—and the accidental beauty found when studio fixtures accumulate stray color. A lone lavender offsets an array of ochres in carefully stacked rows of paint that intimate another kind of table, a list of data. The image becomes an account of the authenticity it seeks."