Baptiste Ibar: The Doors

Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is pleased to present Baptiste Ibar’s first major solo exhibition, a group of new paintings, works on paper, and a sculptural installation. Ibar is a young artist on the cusp of broader recognition, a prolific talent with multi-disciplinary gifts--he released an album of music in October, 2007 (www.bananaapplerecords.com) and his drawings werefeatured prominently in Michel Gondry’s film (and subsequent art exhibition) The Science of Sleep. Ibar’s paintings are the product of a visionary visual sensibility coupled with a Blakean conception of history. The work in this show collectively forms a series entitled The Doors. The name refers simultaneously to the everyday and to the transcendent; to the discarded doors that Ibar has found and incorporated into his paintings as well as to ‘doors of perception,’ the investigation of which Ibar, like Blake, Huxley and others before him, has made the basis of his artwork.

Baptiste Ibar’s work combines expressionistic figuration with brightly-colored abstract passages. It incorporates collaged elements and is built up in layers with certain motifs recurring within a single work or evolving from work to work. The work is inventive and filled to overflowing with varied visual incident, but made with an unfailing compositional sense so that even the most complex pieces remain striking and graphic. Ibar’s work recalls a variety of antecedents. Ibar’s abstract passages evoke Paul Klee’s tremulous geometry, shimmering color and musical sense of order while the feral strength of his line and the graffiti-inspired layering and re-working of imagery suggests Basquiat.

Currently based in Brooklyn, Ibar developed as part of an extraordinarily vibrant and already legendary arts community that emerged in Providence in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The Providence scene coalesced in a decrepit warehouse district known as Olneyville, where proximity to the Rhode Island School of Design combined with an abundance of cheap loft space and lead to an explosion of creativity. Providence was filled with arts collectives, painters, poster artists and animators making work in shocking bright colors, noise bands charting complex aural territory at deafening volume, graffiti, happenings, performances, installations and other artistic activity, all realized with a free-form, multidisciplinary and collaborative approach. Most of this activity took place in several gigantic loft spaces and semi-legal squats, the most famous of which, named Fort Thunder, was razed in 2001. It was a period characterized by the attitude and anarchism of punk, the psychedelic era’s color palette, and a taste for creative bedlam reminiscent of the Merry Pranksters. It was a unique fusion, a particularly energetic brand of contemporary dada. ‘Alumni’ of this community, largely free of the usual MFA-program orthodoxies, have since been making some of the most compelling work in the contemporary art world. In 2002 the arts collective Forcefield was included in the Whitney Biennial. Since then several solo exhibitions and numerous group shows have featured Providence (and post-Providence) work.

Baptiste Ibar was born outside Paris in 1977. He has lived in the United States since childhood and is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design.