DEFYING GRAVITY: THE WORK OF RICHARD BAILEY
by John Austin
Fired by an elemental understanding of the flow of the unconscious, Richard Bailey's polyphonic paintings have a thorough going sense of power and grace. Paint, flowing harmoniously coalesces to form remarkably synthetic, yet ambiguously sinuous patterns that recall rock formations and landscapes. In these works Bailey activates the picture plane with just the barest flicker of an internalized intensity, a slow burn of recognition ignites the imagery due to the artist's incremental (and often extremely gingerly) layering of his paint spills. Once applied in what appears to be a random site, the artist's colors and febrile layers take shape within Bailey's worlds in which horizons; edges and the unseen world in general are manipulated in order to get our imaginations moving. The result is electrifying.
Art, like life, rests within its details, and Bailey has a strong grasp of the importance of applying contrasts in his work in order to jump-start the imagination of the beholder. In Rocks in Motion, for instance, abstract surges of applied patterns create a numinous plane. In works such as Hint of Red where the saturated picture plane is resplendently filled with surges of energetic patterns the artist has produced an imagistic rendering of a rocky landscape strewn against an undifferentiated background. One might look at this work more closely as it confers much more than a simple topical subject matter, that is the concept of the earthy texture. Bailey has overlaid this reading of his work with more subtle nuances, including incorporation of a red detail.
Rocks in Motion, 48x36, Oil Hint of Red, 28x22, Oil
Bailey's efforts to conflate the space of abstraction (that is a landscape schema) with that mysterious non-mimetic 'other space' assigned to the mystery of looking itself. The role of a collective unseen, therefore, is played against that which is demarcated and denotated. A slippage of yet complementary viewpoints predominates in these remarkable works as a quality which Gombrich calls 'perceptual intersubjectivity' prevails. This intersubjective bias means that each and every viewer possesses an inner insistence (against all logic) on the validity of his view of the world from his particular vantage point.I am suggesting that Richard Bailey's finest work reaches out to the viewer and becomes compelling because this work re-instates in some subtle way the perceptual bias which links us all on a collective level. The results are mesmerizing, fresh and unassailably original. Motion in the Ocean insists on a radical conflation of front, mid and back ground planes as it engages the eye in forms that recall naturalistic, topographic, as well as geological notations. In Cracks in the Earth, an elemental landscape of layered spills gives way to the pulsations of pure energetic sensations that seem to stem from a trance state of automatism within a radiantly internal world of dream and rapture.
