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Enrico Baj at Friedrich Petzel
Art in America, Jan, 2008 by Michael Amy
This selection of work by Enrico Baj (1924-2003) made one long for an in-depth museum survey of this fascinating artist's career, which is too little known outside of Europe. Baj rejected the purity of geometric abstraction in favor of a raw, anthropomorphic art fraught with accidents and steeped in bad taste--Picabia was one of his heroes. Inspired by the Dadaists and Surrealists, in 1950 Baj began producing what he termed Nuclear Art to express "the paralyzing horror of nuclear militarization." This was at a time when artists were still re-establishing connections across postwar Europe, disseminating their ideas through gallery exhibitions and short-lived periodicals, and were deeply immersed in modern and contemporary literature. In 1963, Baj helped found the Pataphysical Institute in his native Milan, inspired by the work of the proto-Dadaist author Alfred Jarry, whose Ubu Roi finds worthy successors in the squat, aggressive figures that populate Baj's work. Baj embraced the irrational, delighted in the transformation of one form and/or substance into another, and reveled in the juxtaposition of antithetical styles.
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Witness Des etres d'autres planetes violaient nos femmes (Beings from other planets were raping our women, 1959), a painting in which Baj imagines aliens invading neutral Switzerland and possessing its women--payback, as this engaged artist saw it, for profiting from wartime neutrality and encouraging xenophobia. This work is one of Baj's "modifications," kitschy flea-market paintings to which he added his own painted and collaged imagery. Here, a voluptuous, bust-length female nude executed in a deadpan realistic style is embraced from behind, thanks to Baj, by a flat and roughly outlined humanoid figure painted with a muddy, highly uneven texture; another ghoulish creature stands in front of the strangely unperturbed woman. Awkwardly rendered as if by a child, these goofy primitive figures clearly belong to a different realm than the female nude, who looks drawn from the world of pulp fiction. Baj is a grand master of the absurd.
Also in 1959, Baj transformed a recently completed painting of a mountainous form into a human figure by attaching--among other things--sashes and medals to it. This was the first of Baj's many Grand Guignol "Generals." Having been exposed to fascism at an early age, the artist developed a profound distaste for authoritarianism and consequently for totalitarianism. In Generale (1961), Baj shows a perfectly flat, snarling figure splayed in the center of the composition, with outstretched limbs cut by the edges of the painting. The surface of its body is painted in a Pollockian drip fashion, alluding to camouflage, and the chest is crisscrossed with collaged-on medals. The dark fabric of the background with its repetitive pattern, serving as a foil for the figure, alludes to bourgeois comfort and conformity, perennial targets of Baj's potent visual wit.--Michael Amy
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