Bhakti Baxter
Resident Frequencies
September 16 - October 21, 2023
Mother Gallery is pleased to present Resident Frequencies, a solo exhibition featuring new paintings by Bhakti Baxter. This is Baxter’s first solo show with Mother. Resident Frequencies runs from September 16 through October 21, 2023. Mother is located at 1154 North Avenue in Beacon, NY.
Bhakti Baxter’s paintings are an act of recognition. The artist visualizes the intimate tensions that have always been present between us, but have long gone unacknowledged. Something undetectable has risen to the surface. The thin but vibrant threads of unseen connections form a syndicate of energy and living things; an ecological static that the artist forms through uncanny valleys and visual glitch. The infra is now emergent between us–freshly revealed and encroaching. In our most sublime post-human experiences of disaster and threat, we are reconciled with this whispering of organic matter; that speaks in the frequencies of anima mundi and vital magnetism. For Baxter, this rhizomatic entanglement of the ecosphere is an open structure, an opportunity to expand our relationship to the landscape, and resist being trapped by the positivist position of the Enlightenment. There in the Enlightenment’s countercurrent, the artist sees the rich complexities of feedback loops and integrated ecologies. To Baxter, natural forms are sine curves and ciphers–quasi and quark-like, emerging and descending in and out of our optical range.
The nature Baxter depicts is a variegated stranger –a burl of intensities. His paintings simulate a virtual and untethered wilderness. In MURMUR (2023), a leafless tree stands alone, ominous like something that has left and been returned to us again– made different in a way that we can’t understand. The trunk is overwrought and hyper- realized through its hard edges and contour. It is an absorbing visual crux against the retreating horizon.. It is so fixed in place that it feels like it is warping the soft world behind it. It suggests a nature that is more mediated than experienced, a world of competing atmospheres, oxygen, and light, that is kept perpetually at a distance. This language of difference may share some of the same powers of Magritte’s L’Explication (1962) in that way, of subjects and objects confused together; informing each other when nearly touching. Baxter’s paintings imply a world where everything is affected– surroundings impinge through proximity, through closeness, and it is now overwhelmingly made latent; each thing suddenly unfamiliar to itself, unknowing of how or what it is or why it’s there. The sound of it is low, a hum or vibration, something that can only be registered on a spectrograph– too large or low to be interpreted like the Upsweep or the Bloop or the low calls of whales. They are paintings that move and operate like doppler effects.
But importantly, Baxter builds up these tensions to find the organizing grid again. Made from folding each painting, a nexus to the disruption is discovered through the hand–through a process of dyeing, pressing, and folding. It is a process that activates and reminds you of the paintings’ material surface, leaving the pictorial illusion of the image to wither on the vine. The folding and dying create a prismatic space– a vertigo of sky crashing into landscape in cycles of aerial and terrestrial perspectives. In the artist’s painting Nocturnal Emissions (2023), the seedling pulls the world in, forming a strange and dark undertow that attracts the earth into its roots. It's a radial x-ray of images and growth–one that suggests looking at something on a scanner bed or a lens–inverting the Hudson River School into a 360 lens on the move, a fractal; or Phillip Taaffe with more pictorial disruptions. In Sympathetic Resonance (sunset blvd cactus) (2022), the dyed ink shapes appear like shadow forms to the subject, apparitions that strafe between legibility as exploding stars and foliage.
In works like Generator (2022) and Regalos del Paraíso (2022), Baxter steps directly into patterns and areas of visual perception. It is more direct, revealing Baxter’s interest in the underlying layers of the natural world–the invisible rhythms and magnetic fields that connect us. These paintings suggest the Hegelian trick, that our perception is correct when we encounter what is beyond explanation–you’ve looked where you weren’t supposed to and found that the world is full of inherent and incommensurable contradictions. Baxter’s paintings allow us to see these natural rifts, but then finally perceive the bends of waves and fields beyond perception, the quiet linkages between us that operate on a molecular level, that are real and perceivable to bats and birds but have always eluded us.
As paintings, it is what Baxter withholds that generates their haunting force. They insist on remaining open structures that break up discursive cohesion, quietly at work deconstructing simple ideas, finding moments of cooperation in the landscape where metaphysics opens up and breaks through positivism. Baxter’s forms astride the mysterious space where both nature and images are stranded. There’s something rich and heartbreaking to that–in trying to know something so deeply that you stare through it, seeking connection to a world that feels like it is slipping away. Baxter’s imagery grasps for it, steadies it, tries to see moments of its symmetry in the drift. It is about finding its order again and keeping the center stick steady while the whole plane of reality shakes. The soft forms of the horizon suggest it is a distance that we can’t reach, but nevertheless, we keep searching. -Andrew Woolbright, August 2023.
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Bhakti Baxter (b. 1979 Miami, FL) lives and works in Topanga, CA. Exploring the relationship between science and spirituality, his work hinges heavily on geometry, the systemic manifestations of mathematical principles in nature, and the interpretive freedom of abstraction. Working in a variety of media within sculpture, painting, and drawing, Baxter’s practice is an ongoing investigation into existential queries through the creative process. Baxter’s work has been exhibited at Nina Johnson Gallery (Miami, FL), Perez Art Museum (Miami, FL), BravinLee Programs (New York, NY), Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin (Paris, France), and Manifesta 11 (Zurich, Switzerland), among others.
