I enjoyed being there, the exhibition area was clevery arranged in a way that the viewer had the impression to walk through the artist's past, following a route that tells a story, with a sort of implicit logic and narrative structure.
I really felt like I was being conducted in Baldessari's mind, and this was a good sensation.

Baldessari's artistic investigation is addressed towards the language, and from the beginning of his work it is possible to notice it. He's also very interdisciplinar: he mixs painting, photography, performance and video, questioning the role of art in the society.
He questioned not only the role of art, but also the role of the artist: in the series called Commissioned Paintings he asked to some beginner painters to reproduce a photography of a hand pointing at some objects, and at the end of their works he signed the canvas writing "a painting by" and the painter name.

John Baldessari, Commissioned Painting: A Painting by Patrick X. Nidorf O.S.A, 1969.
It seems really interesting to me, above all after having studied all the theory related with the debatable theme of authorship, a central point in postmodern literature, where Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault's essays are the core of the argument.
From the 70s, after the Cremation Project, where he burned all his artworks made between 1953 and 1966, his art become more focused on photography, incorporating in his works waste materials and freeze frame from cinematographic film.
Putting together daily or senseless images, the artist is able to build a particular narrative, and suggest different ways to look at the reality. Baldessari uses unusual elements and inadeguate combination to create a state of tension. It can be a kiss in a mass of guns, a small stream of blood on the face of an actress with a pelicans' flock behind, impossible dialogues between a couple; he asks to the viewer to redefine the relations and the reactions of a two-dimensional stravagant world.
From the 80s he starts to use white and black photographies, obliterating the faces with coloured discs, and putting together different images, creating balance and connection where there was any.

John Baldessari, Heel, 1986.
From the 90s there is a return to the association of texts and images. The artist compounds words taken from Francisco Goya's paintings with pictures of banal objects.
I really liked the latest work by Baldessari: Brain/Cloud (Two Views): with Palm Tree and Seascapes (2009).
There was a camera that was projecting the image of you on the wall in front of you, making you feel actually a part of the installation. And part of the huge brain/cloud that was hanging on the wall/sky. Basically, part of Baldessari's brain.

No comments:
Post a Comment