Placing Color Catalogue

Excerpt
"Brett Baker’s work is full of dualities that are not exclusive of one another; not either/or, but this/and. The most obvious of these is the distinction between the easel-scaled high-impasto paintings consisting of repeated bars of dim but saturated color, and the room-scaled installation paintings, in which a monumental canvas is propped a few feet from a gallery wall, creating a long corridor of color, painted on one side and reflected from the other. Together these two bodies of work signify his simultaneous commitment to the materiality and immateriality of color."

"Baker welcomes the association of his smaller works with a surrogate human presence. Indeed they are the size of portraits, and their uniform thickness faces the viewer with the insistence of a visage. It is also notable that he has produced two series of drawings entitled Self and Skull that are equally abstract, as if, like the pioneers of the early 20th century, he wanted to purge representation of all particulars in order to obtain pure presence. This notion of presence has been subject to critical interrogation based on skepticism as to whether the deployment of cultural conventions (iconographic representation and/or conspicuous evidence of the hand) actually achieves presence, or if these conventional codes only signify the desire for a presence that is absent. Baker avoids any simplified affirmation or negation, realizing instead that the question itself articulates the fragility of human identity. Presence for Baker is never a foregone conclusion, but the impetus for an urgent striving. He poses the question again and again in the concretion of pigment, whose turgidity is lightened by flashes of turquoise, pink, lavender, and emerald. Texture’s vestigial function as a trite guarantor of painterly angst is neutralized through unrelieved thickness, but this neutralization occurs visibly, so that color is all the more effective for having made its way up through the murk. Baker scrutinizes the painted mark as a humanist inheritance, confirming it as something worth preserving, but only if it is achieved anew upon each occurrence of painting."

- Vittorio Colaizzi