STEVEN BARIS GEOMETRIES OF FLOW

STEVEN BARIS GEOMETRIES OF FLOW

DOTTED AROUND THE OUTSKIRTS OF CITIES, even smallish cities, you see them:

sprawling, utilitarian structures, often one story high; big, flat boxes, architecturally

unremarkable except for their aggressive blandness. In fact these are no more

“architecture” than is a bus stop or a phone booth. The front entrance is incidental; in

lieu of windows, there are loading docks for freight-carrying tractor-trailers. They could

be almost anywhere—anywhere that is serviced by a major roadway open to big rigs.

They are built for merchandise, but they are not known by the old, pungent term

“warehouse,” with its 19th-century overtones connoting disused goods gathering

dust on creaky shelves. Lacking a sense of urgency, that word is fading from common

commercial parlance—except in its verb form, which is nearly synonymous with

“forget about.” The increasing ubiquity of chain stores has given rise to the regional

“distribution center,” or (even more optimistically) “fulfillment center.” This ascendant

language emphasizes not the wares themselves but the activities involved en route to

their consumption.

In the environs of these structures there is a peculiar sense of spatial disjunction,

stemming in part from the absence of any organic relationship between the structure

and its site. Steven Baris is beguiled by these disjunctive spaces and non-spaces, where

the “center” is marginal, peripheral; where the economically important work of storage

and retrieval is conducted in the exurban zones far from the heart of the metropolis.

In Baris’s paintings—for example, GEOMETRIES OF FLOW E3 (page 06)—these

anonymous buildings become vaguely ominous—simplified, stark silhouettes placed

with great deliberation against a lush, luminous ground. Bands of color suggesting

conduits or conveyer belts sometimes connect the boxy shapes to each other or to the

edge of the canvas, as in GEOMETRIES OF FLOW D15 (page 26), but just as often they

are disconnected. The artist takes some of his compositional cues from satellite photos

of these copious complexes. In paintings such as DRIFT D2 (page 19), he combines

various systems that have been developed for rendering spatial geometrical structures

in two dimensions, simulating the disorientation that accompanies attempts to get one’s

bearings in the “exurban archipelago,” as he calls this specialized district.

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BOOM BOXESStephen Maine

04Baris finds kindred pictorial spirits in the Russian Constructivist artist El Lissitzky,

and Ellsworth Kelly’s sublimely spatial painted reliefs—exquisitely calibrated, tough as

nails. In Stuart Davis, Baris recognizes coloristic playfulness and an elastic, disjunctive

pictorial space that echoes the layered, interpenetrating psychic spaces of the modern

metropolis. Davis’s work, however, exuberantly celebrated the urban life of jazz clubs,

flashing lights, the rhythm of traffic and commerce. Baris’s position vis-à-vis the

new supply-chain culture is far more nuanced, ambivalent. He told me, “I often find a

perverse enjoyment in these worlds while at the same time, an exasperation.”

But Baris is not a sociologist, a psychologist or an economist; it is clear from his

masterful approach to color, surface and scale that he is a painter through and through.

His palette is challenging, to be sure, and it is self-justifying in visual terms, not

symbolic or allegorical. In DRIFT D3 (page 19), a staggered column of polygons in gentle

hues is seen against a vivid orange ground that nearly flattens the painting’s space up

against the picture plane. Loosely drawn, horizontal lines slither across that ground,

implying a matrix or mesh that subsumes the whole. These paintings embody give and

take between the conceptual background that motivates their subject matter and the

formal choices through which Baris puts that subject across to the viewer.

He produces intimately scaled semi-sculptural works and enormous wall paintings

with equally convincing results. STATIONS OF THE CUBE #3 (next spread, right), a

shelf-mounted series of irregular polygons in white acrylic painted on small sheets of

thick Plexiglas, has presence, gravitas, well beyond what its diminutive size prepares

the viewer for: the shapes softly glow with ambient color reflected from the back of the

panels. And the temporary wall work GEOMETRIES OF FLOW H1 (opposite), seen last

year at the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts, framed nine levitating hexagons

in black and turquoise against a 14-by-45-foot expanse of pale salmon-pink. As always

in Baris’s work, there was no clear indication of near and far, over and under, forward

and backward—save for one anchoring overlap in the composition’s upper left corner.

Otherwise, the viewer’s impulse to organize the picture plane in terms of coherent,

illusionistic space was pleasurably confounded.

above left:

EXURBAN ARCHIPELAGO 1, 2012archival pigment print on cotton rag 18 x 65 inches, edition of 10

above:

DISTRIBUTION CENTERS, SERIES 1, 2013archival pigment print on cotton rag 18 x 58 inches, edition of 10

left:

GEOMETRIES OF FLOW H1, 2013latex on wall, 14 x 45 feet Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts

05And it is precisely the pleasure to be found in disorientation that makes these paintings

click. We are accustomed to receiving clarity, solidity, firm pictorial ground from

geometric abstraction. It is the atmospheric ebb and flow of expressionistic, autographic

mark-making that is supposed to be the province of ambiguity and shadow, disorientation

and doubt. “Flux” is brushy. The rigor of unequivocal edges, unmodulated color and

graphically unambiguous distinctions between figure and ground—all hallmarks of Baris’s

work—will, we expect, allow us a firm grasp on the content of a picture and, by extension,

on the larger reality of which it is a paradigm.

So it is a quiet, slow-burning surprise when Baris uses the formal vocabulary of geometric

abstraction to introduce us to a world in which these apparent certainties are not what

they seem, where illusionistic space is turned against itself, where the “center” cannot

hold. As our hyper-networked culture advances, these marvelously unsettling paintings

may come to seem less like a report from an expedition into the exurban archipelago,

and more like a letter from home.

STEPHEN MAINE IS A PAINTER AND CRITIC WHO LIVES AND WORKS IN BROOKLYN.

previous spread, left:

GEOMETRIES OF FLOW E3 | 2013 | oil on canvas | 79 x 79 inches

previous spread, right:

STATIONS OF THE CUBE #3 | 2013 | (7) 12-x-10.5-inch Plexiglas panels, 7-foot shelf

GEOMETRIES OF FLOW E4 | 2014 | oil on canvas | 50 x 50 inches

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GEOMETRIES OF FLOW D18 | 2014 | oil on Mylar | 24 x 24 inches

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GEOMETRIES OF FLOW E5 | 2014 | oil on canvas | 50 x 50 inches

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RHIZOME G1B | 2010 | oil on Plexiglas | 24 x 30 inches

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GEOMETRIES OF FLOW C3 | 2014 | acrylic on Plexiglas | 36 x 36 inches

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GEOMETRIES OF FLOW E2 | 2013 | oil on canvas | 48 x 48 inches

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RHIZOME D13 | 2010 | oil on Mylar | 24 x 24 inches

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GEOMETRIES OF FLOW E1 | 2013 | oil on canvas | 48 x 48 inches

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DRIFT D4 | 2014 | oil on Mylar | 24 x 24 inches

DRIFT D2 | 2013 | oil on Mylar | 24 x 24 inches

DRIFT D3 | 2013 | oil on Mylar | 24 x 24 inches

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GEOMETRIES OF FLOW D4 | 2013 | oil on Mylar | 24 x 24 inches

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GEOMETRIES OF FLOW D10 | 2013 | oil on Mylar | 24 x 24 inches

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RHIZOME D21 | 2011 | oil on Mylar | 24 x 24 inches

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SOMEWHERE BEYOND OR BEHIND E6 | 2013 | oil on canvas | 48 x 48 inches

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25

STATIONS OF THE CUBE | 2010 | oil on canvas | 51 x 51 inches

GEOMETRIES OF FLOW D15 | 2013 | oil on Mylar | 24 x 24 inches

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SOMEWHERE BEYOND OR BEHIND E3 | 2012 | oil on canvas | 48 x 48 inches

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GEOMETRIES OF FLOW D11 | 2013 | oil on Mylar | 24 x 24 inches

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GEOMETRIES OF FLOW D13 | 2013 | oil on Mylar | 24 x 24 inches

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GEOMETRIES OF FLOW D8 | 2013 | oil on Mylar | 24 x 24 inches

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SOMEWHERE BEYOND OR BEHIND E11 | 2013 | oil on canvas | 48 x 48 inches

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EDUCATION

1985 Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, PA, MFA1978 The Evergreen State College, Olympia, WA, BA1975 Instituto Allende, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2014 Geometries of Flow | dm contemporary NYC, New York, NY 2013 Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts, Wilmington, DE2012 Stations of the Cube | Pentimenti Gallery, Philadelphia, PA2010 Solo Series | Abington Art Center, Abington, PA2008 Urban Compression | Pentimenti Gallery, Philadelphia, PA2006 The Correct Distance | Pentimenti Gallery, Philadelphia, PA2004 Recent Works | Schmidt/Dean Gallery, Philadelphia, PA2003 Jeffrey Coploff Fine Arts, New York, NY2003 364 Hayes Street Gallery, San Francisco, CA2002 Jeffrey Coploff Fine Arts, New York, NY2001 Schmidt/Dean Gallery, Philadelphia, PA2000 Butters Gallery, Portland, OR1998 Schmidt/Dean Gallery, Philadelphia, PA1997 University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA1996 Schmidt/Dean Gallery, Philadelphia, PA1992 Paul Cava Gallery, Philadelphia, PA1990 Paul Cava Gallery, Philadelphia, PA1988 Paul Cava Gallery, Philadelphia, PA1986 Grande Masse des Beaux-Arts, Paris, France1985 Gallerie Taub, Philadelphia, PA1984 Stonepress Gallery, Seattle, WA

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2013 Maniac Episode 4 | Groningen, Netherlands 2013 International Biennial of Non Objective Art | Ciliax, France2013 Repetitive Pattern Phobia | Berlin, Germany2013 Three Person Exhibition | Suburbia Revisited | dm contemporary NYC, New York, NY2013 On the Edge | Cheryl Hazan Contemporary Art, New York, NY2012 20 in 2012 Vision | Pentimenti Gallery, Philadelphia, PA2012 Maniac Episode 3: Hamburg | Kunstlerhaus Dosenfabrik, Hamburg, Germany

STEVEN BARISBorn 1953, Lake Quinault, Washington

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2012 Doppler Stop, Traveling Exhibition | Amsterdam, Berlin, Zagreb2012 The Summer Show | dm contemporary NYC, New York, NY2012 Lush Geometry | dm contemporary NYC, New York, NY2012 Elemental | Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, PA2011 Aqua Art Fair | Miami, FL, represented by Pentimenti Gallery2011 Maniac: Manic Episode | Brickhouse Art Gallery, Sacramento, CA2011 Countune International Internet Social Art Project | developed and

curated by Gerd Jansen, Germany2011 Tyler Alumni Series, Robert Storr, curator | Crane Arts Building,

Ice Box Project Space, Philadelphia, PA2010 William Penn Foundation, Philadelphia, PA2010 Spectrum | Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts, Wilmington, DE2009 Garish | Geoffrey Young Gallery, Great Barrington, MA2008 Aqua Wynwood | Art Basel | Miami, FL, represented by Pentimenti Gallery2007 Victory for Tyler: Painting 2007 | Crane Arts Building, Philadelphia, PA2007 Three Person Exhibition | Rice/Polak Gallery, Provincetown, MA2006 Stripes Checks Balances | Michael Gibson Gallery, London, ON 2006 Takeout | Pentimenti Gallery, Philadelphia, PA2006 Bridge Art Fair | Miami, FL, represented by Pentimenti Gallery2006 ART212 Art Fair | New York, NY, represented by Pentimenti Gallery2006 Order(ed) | Gallery Siano, Philadelphia, PA2006 Contour: The Definitive Line | Schedlar/Minchin Fine Art, Birmingham, AL2005 AAF Contemporary Art Fair | New York, NY, represented by Pentimenti Gallery and Jeffrey Coploff2005 Criss Cross | Art Forum Ute Barth, Zurich, Switzerland2004 Selections | Levy Gallery, Moore College of Art, Philadelphia, PA2003 More | Mpercent Gallery, Cleveland, OH2003 From That To This: Artists’ Inspirations, curated by Julie Courtney | Nexus,

Philadelphia, PA2002 Pure | Philadelphia Museum of Jewish Art, Philadelphia, PA2002 Bold | Jeffrey Coploff Fine Arts, New York, NY2000 Group Exhibition | BGH Gallery, Santa Monica, CA2000 Three Person Exhibition | Margaret Thatcher Projects, New York, NY1999 Selections | Jeffrey Coploff Fine Arts, New York, NY1998 Small | Jeffrey Coploff Fine Arts, New York, NY1998 Group Exhibition | Margaret Thatcher Projects, New York, NY1997 Strategies in Abstraction | Philadelphia Art Alliance, Philadelphia, PA

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1997 An Extended View: Landscapes by Philadelphia Artists | Moore College of Art, Philadelphia, PA

1996 2 Up | Philadelphia Art Alliance, Philadelphia, PA1994 Drawing 94: Explorations | Kutztown University, Kutztown, PA1994 Group Exhibition | Paul Cava Gallery, Philadelphia, PA1989 Currents in Abstraction | Long Island University, New York, NY1998 Perspectives From Pennsylvania | Carnegie Mellon University Art Gallery,

Pittsburgh, PA1988 The Drawing Show: Artists Who Have Exhibited at The Drawing Center In New York

Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, MA1986 Selections 33 | The Drawing Center, New York, NY1984 Four Person Exhibition | Galleria Temple, Rome, Italy

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Richard Benari, Backstory: Steven Baris, Tilted Arc, December 7, 2013Edith Newhall, Galleries, Philadelphia Inquirer, October 25, 2013Maniac: Manic Episode 2, Catalogue Essay by Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, Spring 2011Victoria Donohoe, Wilmington Wonder, Part 1, Philadelphia Inquirer, July 23, 2010Libby Rosof, The Art Blog, November 11, 2008Anne R. Fabri, Broad Street Review, November, 22, 2008Victoria Donohoe, Philadelphia Inquirer, November 21, 2008Edith Newhall, On Galleries, Philadelphia Inquirer, May, 2006Libby Rosof, The Art Blog, May 5, 2006Home & Design, Editor’s Pick, Philadelphia Inquirer, May, 2006R.B. Strauss, First Friday Focus, AroundPhilly.com, May 19, 2006Libby Rosof, Order(ed), The Art Blog, May 5, 2006Krystyna Warchol, Who’s On First (Friday), Key to Philadelphia, May 1-14, 2006Roberta Fallon, Young at Art, Philadelphia Weekly, June 30, 2004Roberta Fallon, Sketches, Philadelphia Weekly, April 21, 2004Edward J. Sozanski, On Galleries, Philadelphia Inquirer, April 23, 2004Celeste Starita, This Week in the Arts, Center City’s Weekly Press, May 5, 2004Frank Smigiel, Catalogue Essay: Exhibition at Jeffrey Coploff Fine Art, New York, NY, 2003Lily Faust, The New York Art World, February, 2002Abstract Art Online, Gallery Views/Chelsea, January 26, 2002Roberta Fallon, Sketches, Philadelphia Weekly, January 2, 2002Edward J. Sozanski, On Galleries, Philadelphia Inquirer, June 21, 2002Gerard Brown, You Have to Be There, Philadelphia Weekly, May 26, 1999

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New American Paintings #2, Open Studio’s Press, Spring 1999Robin Rice, The Sun’ll Cross 17th Street Tomorrow, Philadelphia City Paper, July 9-16, 1998Edward J. Sozanski, On Galleries, Philadelphia Inquirer, January 2, 1998Jeanne Nugent, Room for a View, Philadelphia Weekly, June 4, 1997Robin Rice, Familiar Territory, Philadelphia City Paper, July 17, 1997Ruth Latter, Language of Color Stretches from Rome to the Reservation, The Daily Progress, Charlottesville, VA, March 20, 1997Bill Scott, Review of Exhibitions, Art in America, September, 1996Rita Rosen, Sketches: The Art World, The Jewish Exponent, Philadelphia, January 18, 1996Edward J. Sozanski, On Galleries, Philadelphia Inquirer, February 9, 1996Edward J. Sozanski, On Galleries, Philadelphia Inquirer, November 27, 1992Edward J. Sozanski, On Galleries, Philadelphia Inquirer, January 14, 1988Edward J. Sozanski, On Galleries, Philadelphia Inquirer, January 2, 1986Colorprint USA, catalogue, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX, 1983

SELECTED GRANTS + AWARDS

2013 Pollock-Krasner Grant, Pollock-Krasner Foundation2008 Bertha C. Arnold Smith Trustees Award2006 Agnes + Sophie Dallas Irwin Memorial Fund, Travel Grant1997 PEW Fellowships in the Arts, Finalist1995 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Artist’s Fellowship1983 Purchase Prize: Outstanding Merit, Colorprint USA, Texas Tech University

SELECTED COLLECTIONS

Canon USA Inc., New York, NYCoventry First Insurance Company, Fort Washington, PAIroko Pharmaceuticals, LLC, Philadelphia, PALiberty Properties, Philadelphia, PAProgressive Insurance Company, Cleveland, OHPrudential Insurance Company, Newark, NJRosenbluth Travel, Inc., Philadelphia, PAStatoil, Houston, TXTexas Tech University, Lubbock, TXThomas Properties, Philadelphia, PAWilmington Trust, New York, NY

Work included in numerous private collections in North America, Europe and Australia

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This catalog is published on the occasion of the exhibition:

Steven Baris, Geometries of Flow, dm contemporary NYC, March 21 – May 3, 2014.

Funding for this catalog is made possible by a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation.

Cover: GEOMETRIES OF FLOW E1, 2013 (detail), oil on canvas, 48 x 48 inches

Copyright © 2014 Steven Baris and Stephen Maine

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used or reproduced in any manner

whatsoever without prior written permission from the copyright holders.

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