Felipe Baeza Unruly Forms

To develop the series, Baeza (b. 1987, Guanajuato, Mexico) researched Mesoamerican artifacts, including ceramic figures, vessels, and plates in museum collections in Boston, Chicago, and New York City, the three US cities for the exhibition. He is interested in reanimating the power of such objects, understanding that their original making and context imbued them with spiritual significance and energy. In turn, the power of these objects has acted on the artist’s imagination, their imagery absorbed to become part of Baeza’s visual language.

In his approach to both materials and themes, Baeza’s artistic process is one of osmosis and incorporation. His early interest in sculpture led to studies in printmaking, where he explored the physicality of layering, pressing, cutting, stitching, and collaging. On his studio floor, Baeza applies multiple passes of pigment to raw paper until the dyed material expresses the history of its making in layers of undulating color, saturation, and texture. These painted sheets become backgrounds, or are cut into smaller elements and collaged to shape pictorial elements. He also integrates found images drawn from magazines and other printed matter. The hybrid images built up through Baeza’s intensive process combine animal, vegetal, elemental, and cultural forms. In Confined but still intoxicated with freedom, veinlike red offshoots sprout from human hands connected by sinuous, rootlike arm-wings to a cavity within a thorn-covered torso. A Mesoamerican-inspired headdress frames the face of a young man collaged from a vintage physique magazine as the whole figure floats against an ambiguous sky. With these layered, mythic images, Baeza gives us metaphorical access to a different kind of truth that recognizes and celebrates the unconscious power of Unruly Forms.

—Nicholas Baume, Public Art Fund Artistic & Executive Director

Felipe Baeza: Unruly Forms is curated by Public Art Fund Artistic & Executive Director Nicholas Baume with support from Assistant Curator Jenée-Daria Strand.