What lies beneath: Two artists use very different images to evoke responses that have little to do with what's on the canvas

BY LENNIE BENNETT

Exhibition review of John Bailly: Passion for the Ineffable. Originally published in St. Petersburg Times on May 18, 2003.

DUNEDIN - You will think this a stretch, but stay with me.

Viewing the work of Luisa Basnuevo and John Bailly at the Dunedin Fine Art Center brought to mind this passage from 1941 in Virginia Woolf's diary: "I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down."

Okay, neither sausage nor haddock makes an appearance in this show. Basnuevo's paintings are mostly of eucalyptus seeds, and Bailly's contain almost everything except sausage and haddock. But Woolf wasn't talking about just food, and these two artists aren't just working over various objects. Woolf well understood the power of things to evoke in us certain responses, and so do they. In the case of Basnuevo, it's memory; for Bailly it's the randomness of our connections.

On the surface - and isn't that what painting is all about? - you'd be hard-pressed to find two artists more different. Basnuevo's cerebral, studied approach plays against Bailly's wildly frenetic accumulation. But most of us can't resist trying to see what's beneath that surface, how the mind is connecting to the hand holding the pen or the brush. And superficial differences aside, Basnuevo and Bailly have the same aesthetic hard-wiring.

Independent curator Janis Karam Gallo had the idea, and it was a gutsy thing to do, devoting so much wall space to two relatively unknown artists instead of going for a group show built around a style, theme, era or whatever is easier for audiences to digest. (The abstract painting not to your taste? Move on to the figurative sculpture two works down.)

Of the two artists (both live in Miami and received master of fine arts degrees from Yale at about the same time), Basnuevo is more recognizable. She had work in the 2002 Florida Visual Art Fellowships anniversary show at the Gulf Coast Museum of Art and the Sarasota Biennial 2000. She found her theme of the past several years in the pocket of her coat: eucalyptus seeds she collected absentmindedly on a visit to her ancestral home in Spain. Months later, she dug them out of that pocket, their feel and fragrance unlocking memories of her childhood. She began painting them, first as literal objects in a conceptual landscape, more recently as abstract forms grouped and scattered on a densely layered background.

They are not-so-simply beautiful. Resembling at times a village of primitive huts or a table full of Hershey's Kisses, they are landscapes of memory, the little cones receding into washes of paint in some places and emerging with lacquered clarity in others. The plains on which they rest are sentimentos, paintings over paintings, layers of color built up and washed out, cryptic grids and twists just visible beneath the surface.

Gallo has included Omnia, a painting from 1997 before the eucalyptus series, a juxtaposition of semiabstract forms and competing colors, along with studies for it and pages from her notebook. They are like the bread crumbs scattered along a path leading us back to the beginning of the journey, when ideas collided instead of coalesced as she experimented with the valuations of tone and object. Early seed paintings from 1999, such as Blue Seeds, are midpoints in which she focuses on the "it-ness" of each seed and plants it in an almost-literal firmament.

Three Divisions, completed in 2002, is the most complex and satisfying. The little pods have been refined to near abstraction, possible mountain ranges emerging through snow or armies of the night, waiting for their orders. Compositionally, it's a classic arrangement of forms, three unequal groupings that lead the eye up and around, using mass and void in the way that figurative artists might use the sweep of an arm or a greensward. Mixed-media studies nearby that are far less accomplished, almost angst-ridden, show the mental labor required to achieve such serenity.

In Basnuevo's latest paintings, we get the sense that the eucalyptus seeds have done their job and soon will march off the canvases, making room for those ghostly demarcations underneath them to emerge like fertile new growth.

Probably the worst way to introduce you to the work of Bailly is to ask you to consider a reproduction of it on newsprint. It will probably look to you, frankly, like a mess, because it's impossible to translate into dots-per-inch the febrile accumulation of images stacked to critical mass in his paintings and works on paper. They are a mess only in the sense that a chef might say that he's making a "mess of jambalaya," which is to say that Bailly includes almost everything but the kitchen sink in his art and manages to make an elaborately formal melange of it.

It's a counterintuitive process because the philosophical point he seems to make is that there is no point to the information we store in our brain cells and cell phones. It's random, incomplete and most certainly produces effects that often have no discernable causes.

Unlike Basnuevo, Bailly allows us to see the multiple layers of his paintings. Metropolitan Transit has grids of a map crisscrossing line paintings of the Coliseum in Rome, visible beneath, among other things, outlines of faces. We see the Coliseum again - it's one of many recurring images - in Umkhonto we Sizwe (Gallo says that's the name of the military wing of the African National Congress), painted on top of a churning mix of colors and overlaid with delicate tracings of men and weapons.

Along a wall in a hallway gallery are several dozen pages from his Encyclopedia series, which really let loose on his version of chaos theory. A planetarium, the groined arches of Gothic cathedrals, wings, bones, crowns, crosses, Joan of Arc, tribal headdresses, musical instruments - whatever stops him when he's flipping through the encyclopedia on a given day finds its way onto paper.

Still, as much as he propels us into this universe of chance, Bailly can't seem to resist infusing it with a visual Esperanto that helps us sift through it, his gift as a draftsman too insistent to be denied. He's a young artist still taking it all in with, we hope, plenty of time to put filters on the information overload that he works through in the Encyclopedia series and transfers to his larger paintings.

Maybe this is a random world. But, like sausage, haddock and everything else, you gain a certain hold on it when you can wrestle it onto paper or canvas.

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