Su Baker: Paintings

The Age
May 16, 2006
By Ashley Crawford

The organic seems to be the order of the day in Richmond right now. The Perth-based artist Alex Spremberg is displaying a suite of powerful, largely monochromatic abstractions at the Karen Woodbury Gallery, while almost literally next door the newly opened John Buckley gallery features the strange, swirling forms of Su Baker.

Baker has exhibited nationally in public and commercial galleries since her first solo exhibition in 1983, including the 1989 Perspecta at the Art Gallery of NSW. But this is the first Melbourne show for Baker, who is also the dean of the School of Art at the VCA, and although it has the sense of a grouping of works on canvas that is not quite resolved, when she hits the mark it is a powerful exploration of the power of suggestion.

While Spremberg next door carries an almost cool, scientific sense of exploration, Baker's work is indisputably feminine. Her flowing greens, burnt siennas and blacks are distinctly sensual affairs

The show veers through the extremes of tiny, intimate paintings and large epics.

Both the large and the small scales work on different levels; the massive triptych In the afterlife of painting - Serious Pleasure is almost operatic in ambition, the three canvases only just holding in a bustling energy and a remarkable palette.

Huge burning globes of green throb next to intimate, transluscent globules sitting on a volcanic, visceral surface while the third canvas in the grouping is a blazing abstraction of blacks and burnt sienna. In the afterlife of painting is not unlike an attempt to illustrate the formulative, eruptive moments of life on earth.

Similar themes arise in After quantum foam; an almost sexualised abstraction that suddenly "tightens" into clearly discernible "eggs" - milky spheres floating against the chaos of primordial confusion. It is almost reminiscent, in sensibility, of the creepy egg-pods in the film Aliens.

Indeed, there is something of a sci-fi sensibility running throughout this exhibition, and also apparent in Baker's titles; Eclipse, Orbit, Chaos vignette. It is as though Baker is remaking a world or a universe and using the chaotic natural flows of paint to gradually build up a sense of order.

Su Baker - Five, 2004

The paintings here seem to make themselves by the material circumstances she uses, the flowing elements creating their own forms. While in the past Baker has worked in more representational forms, here she has abandoned the control of that narrative, resulting in a libidinal response rather than interpretive. In a sense she is "collaborating" with her materials rather than battling with them.

The exhibition has something of the air of a laboratory structured for alchemical research. These investigations have led to works that border on the psychedelic; "an emerging hallucination from the power of suggestion" - as she puts it, with all the hints of '70s psychedelia and Jungian theory that are an inevitable part of such an exploration.