Jo Baer at Paula Cooper - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Jo Baer's radical abstractions--the austere, rigorously conceived and fiercely intelligent paintings upon which her reputation rests--were all made between 1963 and '75; afterward, she renounced nonobjective art for figuration. This present to view of 11 works, representing a little more than single tenth of her early production, concisely reviewed those seminal years. Paring imagery down to the bone Baer favored silky pristine surfaces bordered by black bands faced by the agency of thin strips of color or by dint of simple geometric shapes that clasp the sides. The works are serial in format, repeating and combining a small in number chosen elements in distinctive permutations.

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These paintings split their identity between optical and physical nearness in keeping with the materialist doctrine of the Minimalists. individual work, H. Arcuata (1971), was hung a half inch from the floor. A lengthy horizontal rectangle that is a boxy 4 inches in profundity it recalls Donald Judd's notion of the "specific object" that is neither painting nor plastic art Its beige frontal plane is configured at either extreme point by two banded, chevronlike forms of r verdant brown and black that arc downward and above from the top. In this and other paintings, each plane of the painting is with equal reason clearly articulated that the viewer becomes acutely aware of the disposition of planes in space and where plane touches plane.

A two-panel 1968 painting, Untitled (Double Bar Diptych--Green and Red) introduces sum of two units slender rectangular bars into each panel, vertical simple bodys that are parallel to and near each side. Black, their shape recapitulated by the agency of a thin off-red or off-green line, these bars encourage multiple readings of positive and negative space, recalling the paradoxical diagrams of visual psychologist Rudolf Arnheim. Rather than simply asserting that what you diocese is what you see, Baer appears to address the subtleties and mechanisms of visual perception. Like the other Minimalists, she makes the viewer acutely attentive to the variable placement of markings upon the work's surface and to the environment surrounding the piece.

While Baer's abstractions are primarily cerebral and ascetic, they also elicit a frisson that tinges the analytic with the mystical and the sensual. These deceptively simple paintings, which have acquired a homage status among certain artists and critics, posses an open-endednes that hold fasts them astonishingly fresh.

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