Far-Seen Spaces
by Christina Kee

Malado Baldwin’s recent paintings leave an after-impression of far-seen spaces, perceived in washes of peculiar hue and delineated in the most expansive of gestures. The subject underlying this artist’s abstracted work seems a distance yet to be traveled, and her vision unfolds like the maps and markings of a hopeful young pilgrim.

Works like thebaid (2007) and anticipated ruins (2009) overtly take their cue from the natural formations - rhythmic, solid and fluid - of a beckoning landscape. In an almost paradoxical manner, Baldwin uses solid bands of color interspersed with thinner washes and drips - the means and methods of “flat” abstraction - to create scenes of a complex spatial identity. Here the viewer’s eye is led gently into the leads and leanings of a distinctive topography, through graceful horizontals and softly recessive planes. Whether springing from observation, photograph, association or memory, the works from these series imply the notations of a receptive eye, submissive hand, and a spirit sensitive to nuances of atmosphere. The effect is of a particular world set out - complete - before us.

Baldwin’s works are not, however, simply scenes - or even ideas of scenes - passively recorded. There is strength of intention behind the vertical brushstrokes of vision field (2007), for example, that stand out against the roll of horizon forms, and a decisive, punchy quality to the intrusions of saturated color that break and challenge atmospheric planes. It is as though this traveler-artist has stopped not only to observe, but to shape and track the space before her – almost as a hiker marking a path might tie a bright bit of cloth in an otherwise indistinct wilderness. Sometimes playfully, sometimes anxiously, Baldwin’s exclamations of paint engage in a game-like process of teasing visual signposts from the prima materia of the landscape motif. The effect suggests a double-translation: from space to paint, and from painted-space to structures delineated intuitively through the creation of mysterious points of reference.

There is a surprising narrative charge to Baldwin’s paintings, which might, upon first glance demand a more formal approach. The yellow mass of green hills, blue cloud (2009), buzzing within its cadmium aura, appears like an apparition unlooked-for; the mirage-like coliseum form of wishing you well (2008) possesses the jarring presence of a fortification discovered in what was believed to be uninhabited land. The new Longhouse series of works draw overtly on North America’s long history, while suggesting passages taken from an architect’s dream.

It is usually impossible to know when Baldwin is taking her cue from direct observation, intuitive variation or pure invention. While this is true of much contemporary painting, Baldwin’s work displays a unique fidelity to subjects external to the generation of the painting itself – however ambiguous those subjects may be. Where some painters following a similar process to Baldwin’s, drawing freely on a range of source material and painterly applications, might be led to surrealism-lite or formal eclecticism, this artist’s pieces remain grounded in their evocation of a highly specific place or sensorial event. It is as though the moments of invention, addition and distortion that appear in this artist’s work, even the instinct towards abstraction itself, is in fact led by a mimetic impulse. A survey of this artist’s diverse works through the years reveals a remarkably consistent approach of intuitive research and experimentation; a striving to give image-form to an experience of otherwise indefinable nature.

A series of Baldwin’s drawings from close to ten years ago point to the searching sensibility so apparent in her more recent works. Taking the form of tiny graphic assertions executed on delicate newsprint pages, “post-its”, and ticket stubs, these small and potent works play off of the print forms of their ephemeral supports. A collection of drawings done on the fragile surfaces of lottery tickets echo the busy number fields of their printed ground, but departs fancifully from the structure given, suggesting nothing so much as the rhythmic progression of a jackpot-fantasy, an alter-experience to the blueprint of the support. Paintings executed somewhat later, like cityscape (2001) develop a similar motivation, morphing the basic structures of suburban scenes into impossibly-scaled forms reminiscent of turbines, flying saucers and parachutes in free-fall. Even when forms are not recognizable as anything other than shapes or colors, they exude, actor-like, a singularity of purpose striving to convey something other and beyond what they appear to be.

Despite their ambition of scale and color, Baldwin’s recent paintings leads us back not to the grand tableaux of Frankenthaler or to the all-encompassing gesture of Pollock, but rather to the peculiarly introspective scenes of early European abstraction. We are reminded of artists like Paul Klee and Kandinsky, who pushed the conventions of their medium less from a reaction against formal constraint, than from an almost mystical need to communicate what was believed to be new and different forms of knowledge, separate from those which could be expressed through conventional means. In the most recent work, Baldwin has applied this spirit of questioning to places she has lived and traveled to, and the results are the most personal and poignant to date. The openness of the landscapes of Mali, Namibia, and the deserts of the Southwestern States invite, from this artist, an almost visceral introduction of unexpected forms. Sea, land, cloud and vapors are intermingled and restructured as a means of giving shape to the landscape’s imposing vastness, and horizons are allowed to double, tilt and extend to accommodate the sensation of a world that remains ever-unframed.

Baldwin’s vision of these landscapes is sometimes euphoric, sometimes vertiginous, often beautiful, but rarely safe – the spaces in her paintings are not tame. In one haunting work, dry heat, storm brewing (2006) three bands of color serve to convey the impending heat of an open sun-lit plane. It is a powerful statement of shapes moving closer, and like the best of Baldwin’s work, evokes - in a spirit almost prophetic - a space to be confronted and a situation soon to be.

Christina Kee
New York, September 2009