John Baldessari: Raised Eyebrows/Furrowed Foreheads: Part II

Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art (Lisbon)
John Baldessari: Raised Eyebrows/Furrowed Foreheads: Part II

Merging photography, painting and cut-out shapes above the picture plane Baldessari’s artistic subversion has built a relationship between word and image. In the current exhibition, windows open an imagined territory that is physically delimited by the two rooms. These plane pieces narrate experiences and events on colourless walls; colourful lines on the figure’s foreheads, eyes and eyebrows are unwrapped as three-dimensional furrows into the artist’s exploration of human identity. Still, with a quite ambiguous humour, Baldessari, in this series about raised eyebrows and furrowed foreheads, based on appropriated images, maps the result or effect of the object’s action or condition on the logical interpretative disjunction.

For instance, works such as Angel (with Cross) and Person, Two cannons, Man (Falling) and Horse or Money (with People Gambling), all from 2009, reveal glimpses of hidden contexts perceived individually by our own: in Man (Falling) and Horse two photos of eyes with painted eyebrows converse with a painted photo of a man falling from a running horse; or in Angel (with Cross) and Person, an yellow cut-out cross is shown by the Angle to a man holding up his harms while the lower half of the work a troubled blue forehead is reminiscent of the Vetruvian Man, disperse in a yellow background. A discourse extending between photography and painting, linking space and colour. On a three-dimensional level these works disclose an imaginary order embroiling the fragmentation of human bodies and consequences.

This body of work created after series such as Noses & Ears, Etc. (2006-07) and Arms and Legs (Specif. Elbows & Knees), Etc. (2007) addresses the idea of the whole and concerns the total, a characteristic of John Baldessari’s works. In more recent years, he has fragmented single motifs such as the human body on to the canvas areas to defy linear narratives or plain and conformist interpretations. While de-mystifying the artistic process and criticising image consumption these artworks epitomize the whole body that is transformed through assumption into abstractions about linguistics and aesthetic philosophies.

Published at Lapiz, Revista Internacional de Arte. Año XXVIII, Núm. 254. (88), Junio 2009 España © John Baldessari, "Money (with People Gambling)", 2009