Marian Goodman Gallery is presenting a new series of works by the legendary Californian conceptual artist John Baldessari at its London gallery. Titled “Miro and Life in General,” the exhibition continues Baldessari’s ongoing exploration of the similarities and differences between painting and photography, image and text, which he began in the 1960s with his early text and photo-text paintings and further developed in the 1980’s with his highly influential photo-based works.“Miro and Life in General” takes place within the context of an important shift in Baldessari’s practice over the last five years towards a focus on the art historical canon and the medium of painting. Throughout this period, Baldessari has continued to challenge perceptions of art history and initiate new ways of seeing by juxtaposing images from historical paintings spanning the 15th to 20th centuries with texts from a wide range of sources including popular music, art history, and film noir.The works in “Miro and Life in General” expand on Baldessari’s central interrogation of the art historical canon. Each work juxtaposes a detail from a Miro painting with an altered classical Hollywood film still and one of a number of synonyms such as “Necessary,” “Reliable, “True”, “Unfailing,” etc. Neither the root word nor the Miro painting are revealed, encouraging the viewer to make their own connections between the seemingly disparate elements.In “Reliable” 2016, for instance, Baldessari begins at the top of the work with what appears to be a scene from a black-and-white Hollywood romance to which he has overpainted one of the trees in green, deleted the figure of the man, leaving just his outline, and given the woman red shoes. The altered film still is juxtaposed with a detail from a typical Miro abstract painting and paired with the word “Reliable” at the bottom of the work.The genius of Baldessari’s practice is his ability to harness different modes of visual sensory function to explore the way human beings create, interpret, and establish meaning from visual stimuli. The longer you spend with works such as “Reliable” 2016, the more the contextual, scenographic, narratival, aesthetic, and conceptual connections and contrasts seem to reveal themselves, initiating a dangerously addictive game of puzzle solving.
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