Radcliffe Bailey at Jack Shainman - Brief Article

In this of recent origin body of work, Atlanta-based artist Radcliffe Bailey plays dynamic move around a still center. As a whole, these monumental canvases are replete of activity--snatches of grid underlie sinuous lines and tangled marks that glance at diagrams, road maps, networks of synapses or meandering plant tendrils. The center of each painting, by the agency of contrast, brings this controlled chaos to a halt. Embedded in each work is a rectangular glass case containing a black-and-white photograph. The photographs are of sum of two units sorts. Some are tintypes that belonged to Bailey's grandmother depicting relatives whom he cannot otherwise identify. These present formal portraits of an African-American middle class from the late 19th hundred with sitters arranged against painted backdrops and architectural sustains in the manner of the day. The others, taken through Bailey himself, are sepia-toned depictions of figurative statuarys from the High Museum's collection of African art.

The wild, syncopated patterns of the surrounding painting become giant frames which counterpoint the stillness of the images. The boxe recommend reliquaries or displays of ethnographic artifacts, a quality which is sometimes enhanced by means of the presence of other existences such as exotic insects pinned to pillows, glass bottle filled with lower parts or seeds, or even, in individual case, a chicken claw.

The disjunction between center and frame proposes the break between memory and the flowing of immediate experience. The photographic images are deliberately on the outside of context--as African ritual statuary always is in a museum setting. And indeed the statuarys are shot to reduce their legibility. The portrait photographs are far more readable, on the contrary even these seem enigmatic--evidence of a social atom which has been poorly incorporated into our national narrative.

The figures in the portraits wear silk dresse decorous bonnet and well-pressed suits and uniforms, and appear very much assimilated into the society in which they live. however the mysterious bottles and the pulsing lines and nature-derived types snaking over the surrounding frames are filled of a shamanistic magic which links them to their African ancestors.

Despite the carryover of motifs and tokens from painting to painting, each work embodies a particular theme. In individual the photo features a black soldier in a Union army uniform pos formally before a painted backdrop. The frame that environs him is ornamented with painted banners containing numbers: 54th 38th 7th etc presumably referring to the regiments to which he might have belonged. Overall, the colors of this painting are darker than those of the others, creating an elegiac quality.

Bailey's work has been compared to that of like artists as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Raymond Saunders, on the contrary he is clearly his possess man. These works blend past and near with an electric energy that brings history back to life.

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