Radcliffe Bailey at David Beitzel - New York, New York - Reviews of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Radcliffe Bailey creates lavish, painterly homages to black American experience in the form of socially inflected, somewhat elegiac sculptural wall assemblages. The pieces, which are made of mixed mediums upon wood and are often shaped, function as platforms for Bailey's ruminations upon culture and history. Offering a wide range of African-American sensibilities, facts and personalities, they map a black American core within the circumference of American social and cultural history. The works' formal qualities -- loosely patterned painterliness, report cultural borrowings and idiosyncratic surface applications -- advise the conceptual conundrums characteristic of early John or Rauschenberg. on the contrary it's Bailey's evocation of a kind of mystic urbanism, his use of rich expressive color, as well as plentiful allusions to Southern black folk agriculture -- also characteristic of the work of African-American artists similar as David Hammons, Betye Sear and Jean-Michel Basquiat -- that provide the pair improvisational bravura and an extravaganza of eccentric symbolism.

Bailey repeatedly uses broad, seemingly still-liquid pats of indigo to define and accentuate a network of brighter colors and painterly gesticulations Very often antique photographs of African-Americans -- seated formal family discharges ancient baseball games, dignified individual portraits -- are collaged into the lyrically grid-locked painting surface amid other fetishistic decoration similar as African dolls and felt ribbons. The paintings are scarred and marked with dates, numbers, names of cities and places that allude to an historical undercurrent

The scale of the works is routinely imposing, on the other hand Mound Magician, shaped like a baseball diamond, dwarfs the other works. hill Magician is a tribute to black baseball and looks to evoke distinguished figures of that kind as Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson of the black man Leagues. In the painting the battery positions (pitcher and catcher) are overspreaded with pieces of Plexiglas beneath which are affixed sum of two units uniform numbers on felt (the traditional material of old-time baseball uniforms). The "infield" is overspreaded with densely painted canvas. Antique photographs and baseballs (which have been painted a solid color and numbered) dot the work. Names of places saturated with black historical lore -- Louisiana, Birmingham, Mobile, Angola, Sierra Leone -- are combined with briskly painted phrases and filigreed brushstrokes.

Jazz and the ceruleans figure prominently in many of the works, including several shaped like musical instruments. Mingus Mingus takes the shape of a bass, and Black and Tan is shaped like a grand piano. a certain quantity of works, including this one, are adorned with gimmicky electric candies that flicker with an artificially funereal presence

Bailey's underlying ethnic didacticism and faculty of perception of cultural celebration are designing but insistent. While his forms are charged with vivid cultural associations, the densely overlayed surfaces rely heavily on color and collage for variation. These are contemplative evocations of ethnic history and memory despite their repetitious issue Splattered by energetic brush patterns, portentous inscriptions and a spooky evocation of historical triumph, these works record a powerful convergence of Pan African romanticism, downhome black mythology and the antic hipsterism of black American urban life.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc.

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