Joe Baldwin Retrospective
Repeating geometrical patterns have a long history in modernist paintings, with very different meanings in works by Mondrian and Frank Stella, for example. But both artists comment on the geometrical form of the canvas itself, and by extension on the rectilinear room in which it’s displayed and the geometry underlying Renaissance perspective. Such works produce the feeling that emptiness itself is regular, predictable, rational–one reason why Baldwin’s untitled painting formed of a “grid of lozenges” is disturbing. Black lines on white make repeated triangles, but the grid is all twisted out of shape: some triangles are twice the size of others. It’s as if the fabric of space itself had been distorted. (Baldwin told me of a more personal connection: his father, Jonathan Baldwin, painted geometrical abstractions when Joe was little, among them “perfectly regular lozenges.”)
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Spirit of England is in a way even more warped. A grid of orange lines floats in front of the British flag, which is rotated 90 degrees and painted in shades of pale blue green. The orange grid is regular at the top and sides but broken and twisted at the center and bottom: Baldwin copied a photograph he took of grids painted on two sheets of fabric, one wrapped over a hat dummy and the other laid out flat behind it. As a result the breaks in the finished painting’s grid suggest a head and shoulders. Here the flag and the grid imply authority–the authority of national symbols, geometrical abstraction, traditional perspective, and rectangular paintings themselves–while the figure interjects a humanizing element into these icons of perfection. Baldwin is quite conscious of this opposition; as he told me, “High modernism does something that really transcends the experience of being a flawed person. In some of my paintings there is this idea of reintroducing that, to try to prove you can have this flawed, screwed-up personality or nervous system and still have the work transcend itself.” Though he says there was no special reason for choosing the British flag, it is the flag of the nation that spawned our own and a traditional symbol of empire.
Born in 1968, Baldwin grew up mostly in New Mexico but also lived in Hawaii and Colorado and spent some summers in Alaska. Both his parents were artists and he made art as a child; later he played in a rock band and became interested in poetry. Among the many poets he cites as influences are T.S. Eliot and Charles Olsen, suggesting modernist roots for his often paradoxical titles. It wasn’t until he was teaching English in Japan in 1992 that a survey of contemporary American art inspired him to start painting again, and he’s lived in Chicago since 1994, attending the School of the Art Institute (Gaylen Gerber proved an influence) and earning an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1999.
