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Joanne Baldinger at Roger Smith - New York
Art in America, Jan, 2003 by Joe Fyfe
Joanne Baldinger's previous show was at this gallery's project space in the Roger Smith Hotel's eighth-floor penthouse. There, small rectangular and square works on canvas and wood were hung amid homey stuffed furniture and bookshelves. The paintings themselves depicted unpeopled rooms furnished in generic modernist decor. Baldinger achieved a lovely, soft light in this work, a product of thinly applied, scraped and rubbed blotches of paint, but there was also an impatient energy, as if she were tired of being cooped up in these empty spaces.
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Judging from her recent show, which occupied the gallery's ground-floor exhibition space, it appears that Baldinger has taken herself out--to go shopping and on the town, among other places. The paint has a new liquidity in these still mostly smallish works; Baldinger handles it like a light-filled substance, so that layers can be built up on the canvas without diminishing the underlying glow.
There were a number of still lifes, including Dina's Nikes (2001), a pair of red running shoes against a field of creamy white, and a painting of two glasses of Scotch on the rocks sitting on a black table. Honey (2001) depicts a go-go dancer in the atmosphere of a smoky dive (do such places still exist?), amid nuances of rubbed dark brown oil paint. Rodney's Keyboard (2002), which might be from a more genteel nightspot, features a pair of hands tickling the ivories under a spotlight.
In a category one might call "I enjoy being a girl," female figures strike insouciant poses in a fashion-world environment. Ungaro's Studio (2001) includes a standing figure in a pink couture gown that forms a trinity with a dressmaking dummy and a semi-reclining female studio assistant. The latter wears a black turtleneck and a white, oversize man's shirt, like Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face. The Ungaro dress looks like taffeta and has a peach-colored shimmer; the dummy is painted in an exact shade of dirty beige. Some clothing thrown about the foreground has a range of pastel hues that seems grounded in precise observation of last year's colors. These are sensual, airy paintings shot with a current of dizzy high living--Fairfield Porter crossing paths with Holly Golightly.
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