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Crazy Horse
Blake Baxter
June 4 - June 25, 2011
Sweet Lorraine Gallery
183 Lorraine Street
Brooklyn, NY 11231
By appointment:
info@blakebaxter.com
(917) 885-8650
Blake Baxter's recent body of work continues his investigation of concrete as a material for abstract painting. In the paintings, the stains, oxidization and mineral deposits that we see in the unattended spaces of contemporary architecture are re-contextualized and formed into large panels that engulf the viewer's field of vision. This work suggests the influence of American Transcendentalist tradition in its use of the everyday to generate heightened states of awareness and shows a diversity of influences in this vein.
The work "Crazy Horse" (2011) uses a familiar Mark Rothko format to invoke Neil Young's most famous band in a tribute to the use of simple methods to creating throttling physical effects on the audience. The titles of other works, "Rosebud","Nocturne", "Sand Creek", proffer a multi-faceted inquiry, referencing events in the life of the Sioux warrior after whom Young's band was named, while simultaneously connecting the work to familiar Romantic ideas about nature. Still, the works themselves create immersive visual, and sensory experiences more likely to be found beneath a neglected urban overpass.
This mediation between Nature and the world as experienced locates the real intention of these paintings as generators of focused visual attention and tactile awareness. Independent of their sources in the city, or their precedents in abstraction and philosophy, they are constructions made from everyday material with the intention to separate the viewer from the mundane.
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