Jo Baer at Moore College of Art - painting - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - Review Of Exhibitions

In 1975 Jo Baer exhibited her Minimalist canvases in a solo display at the Whitney. A hardly any months later, in a radical anticareer impel she left the U.S. for Ireland. (She now lives in Amsterdam.) At the same time, she abandoned abstraction, slowly developing a challenging kind of figuration. Her exhibition at Moore society of Art was Baer's first major observe in this country since the Whitney show

Where her earlier work placed dark, thin borders around white surface of lands Baer now deploys images in composite seemingly improvisatory liaisons, with differing scales, horizontals of pictorial finish and historical sources rubbing up against each other. Delicately painted, flat drawn at times, these works have a sketchbook perceive although they loom as large as history paintings. In a strange way, these are history paintings. The same work can contain a monumental horse, a view of the Imperial Palace in Beijing and an ancient image of coupling snakes superimposed upon a seductively posing female figure, among other more sombre depictions.

With their semi-transparency and their superimposition of images gathered from disparate sources, these paintings superficially recall those of David Salle. (It could be argued that Baer beat him to the punch) Baer festivitys in building a dizzying architecture of allusions which belies her shallow pictorial space. Her commitment to tracing without patterns of meaning, however multiple or openend is underscored through the didactic texts she writes for her catalogues, individual of which accompanied this show

The orchestration of her base images yields a surprisingly consistent, if condensed thematic cosmos. A central leitmotif is the taming of animals, an allegory of subjugation versus wildness, with branching metaphors related to sexuality, wounding, dominance in relationships and ultimately all a whole s of hierarchical control. Baer's signature image, a falling gelding, was retrieved from a volume on untamable horses. In several works its hurted genitalia are outlined in r popping without from the pale grounds. In Vaulting Horse (1990-91) individual of four recent collaged drawings, a scythe overlaying the horse's neck can be read the two as a horse-collar and as an instrument of beheading.

A large painting from 1991 Of a Fearful regular arrangement (Bound Hand and Foot), places jackbooted feet and leather-gloved hands (that is, human extremities overspreaded in animal skin) against famous images of prehistoric shaman figures in animal disguises. These entranced, dancing priests all display erections, in contrast to the ubiquitous gelding--signs of their freedom?

The implements which return throughout this work--shears, scythe, riding crop--came for me to stand for the controll violence of intellectual dissection, including Baer's hold formidable analytic presence. At the same time, the milky paint surfaces, delicate draftsmanship and sinewy forms strike one as being to embody those slippery, organic qualities that somehow or other endure despite efforts to rule them. The very transparency of these images present the appearances to protect them: to become entirely physical, or visible, would make submissive them to the harsh laws of civilization.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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