For ‘Flash Art’ Magazine
Not long ago, a cartoon in The New Yorker showed a man passing by a bar that had replaced ‘happy hour’ with ‘lessened anxiety hour.’ John Bauer’s enormous paintings, filling the front room at Bellwether Gallery, pick up on the mood of the nation with a humor all their own. Set against a glossy, black background, each painting is an organized riot of marks and shapes set in the micro-gravity of deep space.
Two things become clear quickly. First, the architectural outlines, grids of color and areas of digitization look like direct quotes from popular contemporary painting. Second, the swirls of gold spray paint, recurring turquoise and purple colored shapes and the occasional v-shaped outline of a bird in flight are a conscious effort at bad taste. The paintings are a parable of taste gone berserk, of what might happen if a cosmic wind swept up the ‘high’ and ‘low,’ contemporary and dated, and blended them together in a chaotic swirl of signs.
This world without aesthetic law, is likened to the country’s current political and economic uncertainty in titles like, ‘Another Layer in the Conspiracy Theory’ and ‘White Collar Crime.’ Other titles refer to heavy drinking and pharmaceuticals, suggesting the extent to which ‘free-floating anxiety’ can take its toll. Abstract painting rarely tells such a clear story.