JOHN BALDESSARI

Vertical / Horizontal Series

December 11, 2003 – January 31, 2004

John Baldessari, one of the most influential conceptual artists to emerge since the mid 1960’s, was born in 1931 in National City, California. He studied in California and Los Angeles and has won many awards, among which are for Lifetime Achievement. In the year 2000 he obtained his honorary degree as Doctor of Fine Arts. He lives and works in Santa Monica, California.

By using a selection of texts and photographic images reproduced on plain white canvases, John Baldessari’s work, as that of many artists in the 1960’s, started off by focussing on the deconstruction of the modernist art dogma «Art for Art». His collages and video works combined high-minded phrases culled from art books, with a loose structure of images drawn from every level of contemporary experience. The works repeatedly questioned the common assumptions about art, foregrounding their arbitrariness.

By the mid-70’s however his work of deconstruction had reached an endpoint. He then begins to investigate the mass-produced dream whose record is kept in the archive of Hollywood, and the intersection of that dream with the idealistic fantasies of modernist formalisms.

Since the 80’s he has been working largely with dream factory refuse and picture waste products rich in calculating beauty and stylized meaning. He adopts sophisticated techniques such as cropping and montage to juxtapose press photographs and movie stills from unknown or forgotten films. These images, often combined with a title or line text, purport to tell us something, a story, a joke, a riddle. But the intensely symbolic energy with which things are informed and the deliberately heightened ambiguity of all relations and references do not allow for a closure in meaning. The libidinal centre of the work is not the discovery of the truth, but the joy of looking.

His latest works, digital prints mounted on sintra or graph paper, paired with a printed title, employ the artist’s ironic removal of the creative hand; they convey a highly conspicuous polish, a hyppereal gloss, familiar in printed and audiovisual media of our time. While possesing a dramatic, «strange» presence that borders on the abstract (or absurd), these works aim systematically and intuitively at a kind of information language. No matter the form, his art with its humorous pedagogy is about and still remains about seeing through a veil of culture. The exhibition will last until January 31st, 2004.

The gallery remains open Tue-Fri 10:30-20:00, Sat 12:00-16:00 and will close for the holidays 24/12/2003 – 1/1/2004.