Yevgeniya Baras: Impastoed strata
Yevgeniya Baras, installation view (Photo by Jason Andrew)
Contributed by Jason Andrew
Spend anytime out in the rural West, particularly the plains of southwest Texas, and you’ll discover the daunting challenge of repelling dust and dirt. At some point, you just have to accept a little discomfort as a small cost of the region’s wondrous horizons, desert winds, and moonlit nights. Returning from a coveted residency at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, painter Yevgeniya Baras incurred that cost and returned with a lighter palette and a renewed sensitivity to form in her new process-oriented paintings, on view in “Seam, Scar, Sign” at Nicelle Beauchene through May 26.
I came to know Yevgeniya and her work in the trenches of Bushwick circa 2010. She and a lovely group of artists founded Regina Rex around that time, and I included her work in a 2011 exhibition at my gallery Storefront, then on Wilson Avenue. Muddy, dark, and moody with thick impastoed surfaces and a synthesis of diverse subjects that allude to modern psychoanalytic theory, these paintings drew me in.
While the new set of paintings move beyond their mysterious predecessors, they remain deep image painting– a concept I derived from the unexpected juxtapositions and surrealist leaps made by poets of the 1960s. It’s well suited to Yevgeniya, whose raw imagery conjures a world that floats between the real and the dream and inspires symbolism and mysticism.
Eleven paintings, all made in the last two years and all untitled, make up the exhibition. While the works are easel-sized, existentially they scan way bigger. Acutely attuned to the human condition and imagining the canvas as an extension of the body, Yevgeniya has continued to layer her surface (often heavy burlap) with impastoed oil paint, rocks, bits of wood, and paper pulp. Though she remains alert to darkness, optimism prevails in the new work by way of frothier, fresher, and looser composition. Dusty pinks, lighter blues, and even patches of white have fostered a new approachability.
