Heavy Duty: Abstract expressionists throw their weight around at the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood

BY MICHAEL MILLS

Exhibition Review of Fat Painting at Art and Culture Center of Hollywood. Originally published in Broward New Times on November 14, 2002.

Excerpt from article:

The exhibition gets a substantial jolt of energy from a nearby wall of a dozen oils by John Bailly. Two huge canvases at either end bracket 10 smaller pieces that turn out to be studies for one of the larger paintings. The studies are all of interest, although mainly as appetizers for an extraordinary entrée: the imposing Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho (2002).

The painting fleshes out the ghostly outlines of hands and arms found in Bailly's other pieces here, giving greater substance to the limbs that reach up from the lower reaches of the canvas. Most strikingly, these hands and arms are part of a tangle of forms in browns, blacks, and whites that turns out to include anguished faces. At first, I could pick out only a few faces embedded in the dense imagery, but after staring at the picture for several minutes, I saw more and more faces seemingly taking shape before my eyes. This is optical illusion taken to rarefied heights.

I was not surprised to learn, after a bit of digging, that Bailly, who recently had a one-man show at Miami-Dade Community College's Wolfson Gallery, is drawn to such iconic figures as Joan of Arc, the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L'Ouverture, and South African activist Steven Biko. Bailly translates the struggles of such figures into his stylized, highly expressive imagery, so the outstretched hands and arms become emblematic of millions of people in predicaments of all sorts. He imbues abstract expressionism with a poignant humanism.

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