Kevin Baker

Kevin Baker

The paintings of Kevin Baker swim with a highly ornamented mixture of kitsch and refinement. Baker works on oilcloth, the kind you might have used over a picnic table in the park last weekend. The oilcloth is left bare on the sides of the stretchers, allowing the viewer to see the original imagery or pattern and find its traces in the final painting. Visual elements of the oilcloth are absorbed or reinterpreted into a richly colored lexicon of pattern, fruit, and flowers. Everything seems to float in an aqueous world, an undersea jungle whose fecundity is on overdrive.

There is a peculiar nostalgia in Baker’s work. The paintings are reminiscent of the wallpaper in an archetypical country matriarch’s home, and from the saturated colors Baker often deploys I’d say we are visiting her on a hot summer day. The oilcloth itself had its heyday in 1950’s America, reinforcing this sense of longing for things gone by. But this is not a dusty world of memory; the visual elements are in constant rhythmic motion and everything is very much alive.

Baker’s paintings call to mind Asian painted screens as well as the thick jungles of Henri Rousseau. All share an intense stylization of natural forms, with the effect of drawing out our love for nature while simultaneously distancing us from the natural. We all know that one day we will be left with nothing but memories of our parents and grandparents. As humanity inflicts repeated disasters on the earth, one wonders whether plastic flowers will eventually be all that remain of the gardens our forebears tended so lovingly.

Image: Lugano, Kevin Baker

Profile by Daniel Gerwin