File Note 95: Jo Baer

The career of Jo Baer has regularly been described in terms of an abrupt and decisive transition from the minimalist painting of early decades to the fluid and dreamlike pictorial mode that she famously came to term “radical figuration”. (She has disavowed this definition more recently, dissatisfied by the overfamiliar connotations of “figuration”). And yet Towards the Land of the Giants, which revolves around six recent paintings inspired by Neolithic Ireland, reveals that transition to have been closer to a continuum than a paradigm shift. Across the five decades surveyed in this succinct exhibition, Baer has dramatically expanded the conceptual framework of her earliest minimalist paintings – not so much replacing one ‘-ism’ with another, as reconciling and binding together her myriad and divergent concerns (ranging from the science of colour-perception to the workings of myth and collective memory). 

In Baer’s works of the 1960s and 70s, those concerns centre on pictorial space – the tensions between perspectival illusion and monochrome flatness; the interplay between hard edges and boundless ether; the image as a fleeting presence or an absent presence. Concepts that find dramatic and florid expression in later paintings are played out in coolly reductive terms in works such as Untitled (1966–74), which typifies the acutely pared-down format initially adopted by Baer (and gradually adapted and reinvented over the ensuing decades). Two white monochrome canvases have been bordered by a black stripe, itself fringed with a narrower line of colour. Inspired by the work of Jasper Johns, Baer had arrived at an appreciation of “how a work should be the thing itself”; and in this and similar pieces, the subject of the painting is the very process of framing space and the absence of an image (beyond the most basic image of a portal or window). In Untitled, each white lacuna is made doubly impregnable by the act of doubling the composition into a diptych; each framed space sits beside – and ‘frames’ – the other. 

In the mid-1970s, Baer moved to rural Ireland for a period, and the themes of landscape, nature, history and folklore accrue in ever-multiplying layers on top of her pre-existing ideas concerning space, boundaries, and the point at which an image concretizes or dematerializes. Just as the strips of colour or geometric ciphers in H. Tenebrosa and H. Arcuata functioned as markers – delimiting and mapping space – pictorial elements now cohere and dissipate across the canvas in increasingly complex allegorical systems. Tis Ill Pudling in the Cockatrice Den (La- Bas) (1987) sets forth – both in its prolix title and thronging imagery –an indistinct mythosphere of symbols and impressions. We glimpse a portico and steps that might equally be ancient Egyptian architecture or a Hollywood film set; an exotic red bird perches before an undulating red snake that suggests the caduceus of Hermes (a staff and serpent intertwined), or perhaps the ancient god Asclepius, transformed – as Ovid memorably recounts in the Metamorphoses – into a giant snake that (in the suitably arcane language of Arthur Golding’s translation) “hissed twyce with spirting toong. Then trayld he downe the fine And glistring greeces of his church.” Baer’s work offers a framework – a mental space – for such flights of fancy. 

In the most recent series of paintings on display, the eponymous In the Land of the Giants (first shown at the Stedelijik Museum, Amsterdam, in 2013), Baer returns to the ancient landscape of County Louth, Ireland, refracting its geography and prehistoric monuments through her distinctive painterly lens – a lens that simultaneously abstracts and allegorises reality. The topography and archaeological landmarks of the region are juxtaposed with their own cartographic representations – naturalistic depiction sliding into its schematic, diagrammatic double. The starting point for the series was a famous megalith known as the Hurlstone, in which a perfect circle has been bored through the centre. Local legend has it that ‘a giant threw it there’, and the monument operates in this way as a hinge between human and superhuman realms, or between reality and folklore. In a similar conjunction of the everyday world and otherworldly myth, the paintings conflate real-life forms (monoliths, mounds, or the figure of Baer herself traipsing as if on a walking holiday) with imaginary or remembered ones. For instance, In the Land of the Giants (Spirals and Stars) (2012) has at its centre a spiralling black hole, resembling a giant pupil, which hurls out or sucks in the picture’s scattered motifs; a giant black crow sits atop a stone, seeming, like Ted Hughes’s diabolical bird, to be “Nailing heaven and earth together” with an import that is numinous as much as natural. The sense of the natural world having been invaded by unreal spectres is compounded by chance art-historical interpolations, for example the small figure of the Infanta Margaret Theresa, administered to by her maid, from Velázquez’s Las Meninas. In another way, however, such picaresque intruders deftly evoke the freewheeling workings of the imagination as it wanders through time and place.