Biography
Vincent Baldassano, a graduate of Wagner College, Staten Island, NY with Master of Fine Arts, in Painting & Drawing from the University of Oregon, has taught painting and mixed media at universities, colleges and professional art schools throughout the US, including the Universities of Connecticut, Cincinnati, and Buffalo; the National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts, NYC, Silvermine School of Art, New Canaan, CT and Gateway Community College, New Haven, CT.
Mr. Baldassano is a recipient of numerous painting grant, residencies and fellowships, including NYSCA, CAPS Grants, and SUNY Painting Fellowships. He has been a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome, the Vermont Studio Center and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. His work is in many private and public collections in the United States, Europe and Asia, including the Pepsi Cola Corporation, Pfizer Corporation, the New York Federal Building, Housatonic Museum of Art, and the Savannah College of Art & Design,
National and international exhibitions numbering over 50 solo shows and over 100 group exhibitions include The American Academy in Rome, The National Academy School, NY, the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY, The Butler Museum of American Art, Ohio and the Aldrich and Stamford Museums in Connecticut.
In addition to teaching and exhibiting, Mr. Baldassano was a founding member of the Manhattan Breakfast Club during the early 70’s and 80’s in Soho, New York City where he lived at that time. Latter, while living in Westchester and Connecticut he was owner of ArtPak Transport Ltd, NYC; Station Gallery, Katonah, NY; Executive Director at Contemporary Graphic Arts, Norwalk, Ct, Managing Director at Northern Westchester Center for the Arts, Mount Kisco, NY and Gallery Director at Silvermine Guild Art Center, New Canaan, CT. He is currently Professor of Art at Gateway Community College, New Haven, CT and on the faculties of Western Connecticut State University, and The National Academy of Design.
Mr. Baldassano is a recipient of numerous painting grant, residencies and fellowships, including NYSCA, CAPS Grants, and SUNY Painting Fellowships. He has been a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome, the Vermont Studio Center and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. His work is in many private and public collections in the United States, Europe and Asia, including the Pepsi Cola Corporation, Pfizer Corporation, the New York Federal Building, Housatonic Museum of Art, and the Savannah College of Art & Design,
National and international exhibitions numbering over 50 solo shows and over 100 group exhibitions include The American Academy in Rome, The National Academy School, NY, the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY, The Butler Museum of American Art, Ohio and the Aldrich and Stamford Museums in Connecticut.
In addition to teaching and exhibiting, Mr. Baldassano was a founding member of the Manhattan Breakfast Club during the early 70’s and 80’s in Soho, New York City where he lived at that time. Latter, while living in Westchester and Connecticut he was owner of ArtPak Transport Ltd, NYC; Station Gallery, Katonah, NY; Executive Director at Contemporary Graphic Arts, Norwalk, Ct, Managing Director at Northern Westchester Center for the Arts, Mount Kisco, NY and Gallery Director at Silvermine Guild Art Center, New Canaan, CT. He is currently Professor of Art at Gateway Community College, New Haven, CT and on the faculties of Western Connecticut State University, and The National Academy of Design.
CRITICAL ESSAYS
VINCENT BALDASSANO: COLOR AND FORM, COLOR AS FORM
By Peter Frank
Peter Frank (art critic) Peter Solomon Frank (born 1950, New York) is an American art critic, curator, and poet who lives and works in Los Angeles. Frank is known for curating shows at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in the 1970s and 1980s.[1][2] He has worked curatorially for Documenta, the Venice Biennale, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, and many other national and international venues.[3] Peter Frank
At the middle of the last century, American art seemed charged with a moral imperative: to be only about itself, only about art, only about the interior spirit, whether that of the artist or that shared by artist and audience. Such purity of intention – understandable after nearly 100 years of utopian modernist ideology and a world war that shattered the certainty of such convictions – gave authority to non-objective form and refined, reductive content. But art’s other nature, its antic spirit, began its resurgence in the face of such dour rigor, so that by the early-mid-1960s a young painter could take away not only austerity but jocosity from the example of abstract expressionism. Wit and sensuosity could return; Matisse and Miro could rejoin Mondrian and Malevich.
Even as an undergraduate Vincent Baldassano unlocked his palette and unfettered his line, and in the six decades since he has only broadened his command over the optical and the sensual. Baldassano was an image-maker in his youth, something more now, but his engagement with (not just of) color and contour has always been clever and graceful, indebted to pop art’s – indeed, pop culture’s -- visual and social atmosphere even as it has avoided typical pop reference to the artifacts of consumerism. He would rather derive his forms and tonalities from the natural elements of a still life – the fruits, the vegetables, the flowers – than from their package labels, rather catch the glint of a church window than that of a bus. This is not to diminish pop, photo-realism, or other such tendencies, but only to distinguish Baldassano’s approach as classical, reliant above all on tradition, personal aesthetic impulse, and visual as well as intellectual self-sustenance.
The structural complexity of Baldassano’s painting – almost from the beginning of his career, but powerfully asserted in recent work – does not merely support the allure of his art but, in being so attractive, presents the art as available, accessible even to the more casual eye. This intricate imagery is not hard to understand, but only a bit diffident in articulating pictorial identity. Some forms are more architectural, others more gemlike, still others evocative of landscape in their displays of sinewy planes and swaths of verdancy. Many seem caught at a moment of metamorphosis, as if Baldassano had dreamt of rivers and doors and flashes of fire co-existing in the same experiential as well as retinal space.
The enduring ghost of surrealism animates this work. It has always inflected Baldassano’s art, but by now it has become an inhabitant of his muse’s manse. The instability, even volatility, of identifiable form in these recent paintings allows us to view them first as abstractions, then as apparitions, then as apprehensions, as evasive as, well, dreams. At the same time, the paintings do derive from the world around the artist; the location titles given so many of the works betrays the fact that Baldassano takes inspiration from the light and vegetation of western Connecticut and the lower Hudson Valley – and no less from the foreign climes he travels to, most particularly to Italy, Portugal, northern Africa, and other Mediterranean and Mediterranean-adjacent places. Architecture and history deeply inform these latter works, while burgeoning color-shapes comprise those Baldassano paints at home. But the same exuberance of form and intensity of color infuse his art no matter where it references. Or what – even the human figure makes an occasional appearance.
In fact, where a figural form, even one seemingly quoted from antiquity, can be recognized, the whole context as well as structure invested in Baldassano’s art comes forth – not as the ultimate key to his abstraction (there is no “aha” moment), but as the scale of imagination that energizes these paintings (or, if you would, pictures). Keenly aware of his artistic heritage, the Italian-American, born and raised in New York in its postwar heyday, regards art not simply as a human endeavor, but as humankind’s assertion of its own metaphysical vitality. Art in this regard is a mirror held up to the soul – the collective soul even more than the individual.
A series of paintings produced during the Great Pandemic not only embodies Baldassano’s humanist – neo-humanist? – abstraction but converts it through example into a declaration of beauty. Not of pure beauty, but of a conditional beauty, an opulence distilled from the world around us so that the things we know and the places we’ve been – and the things we conjure and the places we imagine. – recapitulate as bold, often almost heraldic compositions, rendered on fabric and hung unstretched. When Baldassano exhibited this series as the centerpiece of his survey show, “To Be Continued,” at the Housatonic Museum of Art in 2022, he filled a gallery with an arrangement of these banners hung at irregular intervals so as to baffle passage, as in a maze. In certain works this arrangement thrust the viewer almost up against yawning areas of deep reds and blues, and in others put a distance between art and observer so that they took on the air of painterly, asymmetric bunting. Each banner painting, for all its vastness and variegated temperatures, is a visual experience in itself, but when installed as a labyrinth they conjoin into a heady, almost dizzying somatic as well as optical experience.
In these recent banner works Baldassano becomes something of a color-field painter – without falling into the visual and methodological reductivism that aligned color-field painting with its minimalist counterpart(s) in the 1960s. Even while incorporating repetitive geometric devices, Baldassano relies on color to assert the deliberative presence of a painter’s eye and mind – and stimulate the response of a (perhaps literally) captive audience. He would have us surrender not to the maze itself but to its components and the retinal delights they yield. Baldassano sharpens his inquiry with these irregular cloth panels: does the eye derive pleasure at the expense of meaning? Is that pleasure the meaning of the work? Or is the meaning out in the world and do color and form lead us there, or at least point subtly but extravagantly to that meaning? Does color mean itself? Does shape? What lies beyond what we see around us, and beyond what we see in painting? No wonder Vincent Baldassano is still painting six decades on; neither he nor we have the answer, but we get such pleasure from the question.
Los Angeles
September-October 2022
(
Vincent Baldassano: The Expressionist Experiment
by Johnathan Goodman
Jonathan Goodman is a New York-based poet and art writer who concentrates on contemporary art from Western and Asian cultures. He is currently teaching at Pratt Institute and the Parsons School of Design.
Vincent Baldassano’s long experiment with expressionism is based on a strong sense of color and compositional structure. A midcareer artist, he is currently moving from strength to strength in works that are jazzy and exuberant in their palette. Now mostly working in oil, and with some paintings done in encaustic, Baldassano engages in spontaneous play, but nevertheless builds what amounts to an architectural configuration of form. His vivid array of colors and shapes suggests a world that exists just beyond this one, where anything that can happen does happen in the field of the imagination. Of course there is by now a long history in abstract expressionism, a style still attractive to those artists who are in love with its candor and improvisatory qualities. Baldassano is one of the intrepid practitioners of the genre, finding a luminous beauty in the nonobjective play of different hues and forms. Like many of the participants who formed the New York School, in poetry as well as in painting, Baldassano looks to the expression of feeling in works that joyfully address stylistic change.
In image 877, a work done in encaustic, we can see the artist construct an abstract tableau consisting mostly of greens, which give way to greenish whites on the edges of the canvas. Almost a study of underwater forms, the painting seems to surface from a considerable depth, carrying with it the shapes and creatures of the sea (perhaps the encaustic is responsible for this depth). But that would put a figurative spin on an artist who is resolutely abstract. In general, Baldassano’s images of the last few years seem like mandalas, structures of the mind that evidence symmetry. This does not mean, however, that Baldassano has forgotten his sense of inspiration through color and random effects. Color’s inherent joy allows him to invest his carefully rendered compositions with a degree of lightness; one senses that improvisation is central to his process—he is a big fan of jazz. But Baldassano can be symbolic as well; the wonderfully arranged Image 892 consists of what looks like a labyrinth, drawn within a simple house outlined in yellow. Classical in feeling, this work also conveys a lively sense of form. It is clear that Baldassano is both an inspired visionary and disciplined worker, who is well educated in regard to art history.
Image 403 easily captures the viewer’s attention with its energetic densities of expression. Almost a palimpsest, with colors and forms riding on top of each other, Image 403 reads like a whirlpool of evocative shapes. But beyond the compressed concentrations of small masses and vibrant hues—red, turquoise, green, orange, etc.—Baldassano has skillfully worked within a gestalt that holds the contrasts together. As playful as he is, the artist cannot be considered undisciplined or profligate. He is always in control of his hand. In the similar structure of Image 404, we begin to recognize how an arch at the top of the painting contains the magical shapes that float across the canvas. Along with his enthusiasm, Baldassano maintains a flair for the organizational; the lid at the top of the painting acts as a stop for the forms that seem to push upward in two columns. There is a spirituality to what he does, even though no actual religious figure is produced. Maybe suggestion is what Baldassano does best; his love of the ludic quality of paint allows him to hint and intimate without being bound to representation. These recent works show him at the top of his form, addressing inspired schemes and systems that reinforce his—and our—belief in art.
Jonathan Goodman
by Johnathan Goodman
Jonathan Goodman is a New York-based poet and art writer who concentrates on contemporary art from Western and Asian cultures. He is currently teaching at Pratt Institute and the Parsons School of Design.
Vincent Baldassano’s long experiment with expressionism is based on a strong sense of color and compositional structure. A midcareer artist, he is currently moving from strength to strength in works that are jazzy and exuberant in their palette. Now mostly working in oil, and with some paintings done in encaustic, Baldassano engages in spontaneous play, but nevertheless builds what amounts to an architectural configuration of form. His vivid array of colors and shapes suggests a world that exists just beyond this one, where anything that can happen does happen in the field of the imagination. Of course there is by now a long history in abstract expressionism, a style still attractive to those artists who are in love with its candor and improvisatory qualities. Baldassano is one of the intrepid practitioners of the genre, finding a luminous beauty in the nonobjective play of different hues and forms. Like many of the participants who formed the New York School, in poetry as well as in painting, Baldassano looks to the expression of feeling in works that joyfully address stylistic change.
In image 877, a work done in encaustic, we can see the artist construct an abstract tableau consisting mostly of greens, which give way to greenish whites on the edges of the canvas. Almost a study of underwater forms, the painting seems to surface from a considerable depth, carrying with it the shapes and creatures of the sea (perhaps the encaustic is responsible for this depth). But that would put a figurative spin on an artist who is resolutely abstract. In general, Baldassano’s images of the last few years seem like mandalas, structures of the mind that evidence symmetry. This does not mean, however, that Baldassano has forgotten his sense of inspiration through color and random effects. Color’s inherent joy allows him to invest his carefully rendered compositions with a degree of lightness; one senses that improvisation is central to his process—he is a big fan of jazz. But Baldassano can be symbolic as well; the wonderfully arranged Image 892 consists of what looks like a labyrinth, drawn within a simple house outlined in yellow. Classical in feeling, this work also conveys a lively sense of form. It is clear that Baldassano is both an inspired visionary and disciplined worker, who is well educated in regard to art history.
Image 403 easily captures the viewer’s attention with its energetic densities of expression. Almost a palimpsest, with colors and forms riding on top of each other, Image 403 reads like a whirlpool of evocative shapes. But beyond the compressed concentrations of small masses and vibrant hues—red, turquoise, green, orange, etc.—Baldassano has skillfully worked within a gestalt that holds the contrasts together. As playful as he is, the artist cannot be considered undisciplined or profligate. He is always in control of his hand. In the similar structure of Image 404, we begin to recognize how an arch at the top of the painting contains the magical shapes that float across the canvas. Along with his enthusiasm, Baldassano maintains a flair for the organizational; the lid at the top of the painting acts as a stop for the forms that seem to push upward in two columns. There is a spirituality to what he does, even though no actual religious figure is produced. Maybe suggestion is what Baldassano does best; his love of the ludic quality of paint allows him to hint and intimate without being bound to representation. These recent works show him at the top of his form, addressing inspired schemes and systems that reinforce his—and our—belief in art.
Jonathan Goodman
Color with Gusto: The Art of Vincent Baldassano
by Cynthia Roznoy ,PHD
Cynthia Roznoy Curator, Mattatuck Museum. Dr. Rosnoy ,now retired has organized more than 20 exhibitions of American Art
Writing in 1997, New York Times art critic William Zimmer identified painterly boldness as a characteristic of Vincent Baldassano's art. "If the wish is to be surrounded by color used with gusto, the paintings and drawings by Vincent Baldassano grant this wish" he wrote. Zimmer further described Baldassano's goal of communication using symbols and rich cultural allusions "even while being an unabashed abstractionist". Looking at Untitled Volcano,1982 (Fig. 1), Zimmer recognized Baldassano's style as inclusive, progressive and reflective of its art historical antecedents.
Vincent Baldassano came to artistic age when American art had much to offer. By the middle of the 1970s there was a wide variety of styles available to the contemporary artist and the forces that have shaped Baldassano's art have come from a large and diverse pool including American modernism, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. His travels abroad, his studies and his teaching also have had an impact. When asked what historical artists have influenced his sensibility, Baldassano identifies Kandinsky, Marsden Hartley, and Arthur Dove. Baldassano has developed an art strongly based on precedents while clearly recognizable as his own.
A student at New York's Wagner College in the first half of the 1960s, Baldassano switched his major from pre-med/biology to art; he studied painting with Tom Young an Abstract Expressionist and drawing with Bill White, a classicist. He considered medical illustration as a profession but while sketching a canvas at grad school in Oregon in 1964 he says, he recognized his life's work, "I saw myself doing this for the rest of my life" he said. His student work was mostly figurative with an emphasis on the female nude both in painting and sculpture; he produced a series of Florescent Nudes and of bronze Fertility Goddesses (Fig. 2) referencing the Paleolithic era Venus of Willendorf (Fig. 3). Baldassano was at this time also considering graduate studies in art history.
Back in New York by the last years of the 1960s, Baldassano further explored the nude figure, eventually distorting the form and combining it with organic, biomorphic shapes. A work from this period demonstrates a progression towards abstraction that totally loses the nude and focuses on anthropomorphic forms. The beautifully executed drawing Niagara # 2,1967 (Fig. 4) reveals the artist's interest in the interaction and intersection of shapes as they move in, out and around each other.
Delicately colored and gently surreal, the work on paper brings to mind the rhythmic and imaginative work of Catalan Joan Miro, especially his work of the 1930s such as Composition, Small Universe (Fig. 5) whose work Baldassano viewed during his extensive European travels during this period.
These anthropomorphic works announce Baldassano's expressionist urge that culminates in the sensual works of the 1980s and onward. But an aesthetic discovery detour came first—a combined effort of sculpture and painting that resulted in polychromed shaped canvases and cut-out paintings.
Tintinnabulation (Fig. 6) is typical of the boldly colored shaped canvases of the 1970s that were based on dissection of geometric forms. Here, Baldassano cut a cube into modular pieces and used an isometric perspective of three equal axes at right angles to each other in re-arranging the pieces.
This group of works also included sculptural cubes that sat on the floor as well as vertical sculptures that used linear elements like metal tubes to link canvases with pedestal bases such as Untitled (Fig. 7) that are contemporary to the Nana figures that Niki de Saint Phalle began making in 1965 as seen in Dancing Nana (Fig. 8)
During the 1970s Baldassano both enjoyed artistic success and suffered personal loss. He exhibited with the Allan Frumkin Gallery in New York City and at the Albright Knox Gallery in Buffalo where he had moved in 1968. The loft studio on Elmwood Avenue was in a bohemian section of that city that attracted artists and Baldassano enjoyed a group of artist friends that included Richard Gubernick, Robert Flock, Joe Piccillo, and Seymour Drumelvitch. Unfortunately a gas explosion and fire at this space in 1972 destroyed approximately 99% of Baldassano's work. The artist's experience of the trauma is shown in Afterblaze (Fig. 9),
which though witty and humorous, shows an exploding blue center that is interrupted with a discharge of black holes that absorb everything in its space similar to the way fire consumes all in its path.
Baldassano speaks with fondness of his trip to Portugal in 1972-73. Though always a traveler and lover of all things European, this trip allowed him to meet and work with a group of artists that were especially empathetic and challenging. The Portuguese artists Bravo and Lapa and Canadians Greg Connelly, a photographer and Thom Sokoloski, a conceptual artist formed a short-lived but important camaraderie. A promised exhibition at Lisbon's Galleries Judith DaCruz fell apart when the gallery was closed during the 1974 Portuguese Revolution and all paintings consigned to that gallery disappeared.
Upon his return to Buffalo, Baldassano founded BAM, the Buffalo Art Movement. One of the culminating events was a "Happening" at an opening at the Albright Knox Art Gallery. His artistic focus was still centered on his cutout paintings though they now seemed to have gained an inner life that had elements moving in and out and around each other as in Tennanah Lake (Fig. 10) and Untitled Watercolor, 1976 (Fig. 11) reminiscent of his 1968 drawing Niagara #8, 1976 (Fig. 3).
The late 1970s brought happiness in his marriage to Carole, his move to New York City, and the beginning of family life. His East Village studio was their home and a popular meeting place for friends. Always collegial and supportive of other artists, Baldassano founded the Manhattan Breakfast Club (see photo Fig. 12) a group of like-minded sorts including artists, writers and poets. By the end of this decade Baldassano was experimenting anew making collages and returning to the rectangular canvas.
Perhaps more than any other series in cementing Baldassano's stylistic maturity is the group of works titled the American Indian Series begun in 1984. These lushly colored, expressionistic abstractions were a longtime fermenting and have their conceptual origin in Baldassano's graduate student years in Eugene, Oregon 1964-65. There, the artist shared a studio with Peter Quaempts, a Native American of the Yakima tribe who provided Baldassano with a significant understanding of the American Indian in the Northwest. His embrace of this subject matter led to a new pictorial vocabulary that is a synthesis of easily-read image and abstraction. Mandan Village Swing (Fig. 13), a large-scale mixed-media work, incorporates Native American motifs evocative of tribal camp life. A subtle but significant feature of the work is the use of small, glued paper pieces, a reminder of Baldassano's appreciation for collage.
A very different type of abstract art was making headway in America during this era: the post-painterly abstraction of artists like Frank Stella and Kenneth Noland whose goal was to produce a complete, non-referential object. As a whole, Baldassano eschewed this style and its path to Minimalism. Painting has a poetic purpose for him that requires an expressive element similar to Marsden Hartley, an artist that Baldassano admires. After contact in 1913 with the German group of avant-garde artists known as the Blue Rider, and particularly with Wassily Kandinsky, Hartley embraced modernism and developed an abstract style that combined cubism, new color theories and emotional content. Perhaps most well known of Hartley's works are those of the World War I period--his War Motif pictures such as the Whitney Museum's Painting, No. 5. However, Hartley also found richness in the Native American cultural traditions as seen in his 1914 painting Indian Fantasy (Fig. 14).
When we look at works from each of Hartley's and Baldassano's American Indian series we see they share a common painterly vocabulary in the abstracted and simplified forms, non-naturalistic color, and dynamic pictorial structure. Baldassano's Modern Dance at Red Mountain (Fig. 15)
furthers the use of Indian motifs as it celebrates the land that is part of the Yakima Valley in central Washington state, home of the Yakima Indian reservation. The motifs found in Baldassano's Native American Series evolve into volcanoes--East Village,1982/83 from the Volcano Series (Fig. 16),
celebrations of the artists' children--Francesca's Fantasy (Fig. 17),
and salutes to nourishment as in Zinger Tea Blues (Fig. 18).
The triangular forms continue in Baldassano's art to the present day but perhaps the concluding piece of the Native American Series is the reverential painting Yakima Friend (Fig. 19)
done in 2003 when the artist learned of the death of his friend Peter Quaempts. This elegiac work was preceded by the evocative Homage to Bravo (Fig.29) produced in 1990 at the time of the Portuguese artist's demise.
An art advocate as well as an artist, Baldassano has nurtured artists through gallery exhibitions from his early career. This sort of opportunity expanded in the 1990s as owner/director of the Station Gallery in Katonah, New York where he showcased the work of Black Mountain artist Bill McGee, a friend and influence on Baldassano's career. Later as director of the Silvermine Art Guild and Gallery in Norwalk, Connecticut, Baldassano organized more than sixty exhibitions before taking the helm at the Connecticut GraphicArts Print Center. But these administrative responsibilities did not keep him from art-making. At this time Baldassano produced a 4 x 16 foot ceramic tile mural and began the Habitat Series (Fig. 21) a group of beehive-shaped tombs with hermaphroditic implications in its combination of openings and protrusions.
Painting continued in the motif-laden abstract style but moved between large-scale works, some more than 10 foot long, to small encaustic panels that carried a bold lushness beyond their diminutive size as with Long Boat Key (Fig. 22).
With the millennium, Baldassano moved, once again, this time making his home in Oxford, Connecticut where his gracious residence belies its farmhouse origins and where a handsome barn serves as studio, storage, and gallery. One can catch him there between his teaching stints at New York's National Academy of Design and New Haven's Gateway Community College. That is, if he is home from travels to Europe. A trip to Italy in 2006 allowed him the opportunity to the study buon fresco technique with the celebrated Alberto Felici and Stephano Bresci in Florence and Castelfalfi. While in Italy Baldassano made an edition of prints at the Bottega Tintoretto with Roberto Mazetto that indicate the influence of Giotto and Taddeo Gaddi, and he studied egg tempera technique during visit to Florence, Venice, and Lucca in 2007. A remarkable outcome of these recent trips was the return of the figure to his work as seen in Figure After Taddeo Gaddi and Female Figure (Figs. 23 and 24).
The figure, though, seems to remain secondary subject matter at this time. Today, Baldassano is painting large--Dance of Seven Veils (Fig. 25) measures more than 10 feet--using a variety of media from oil to powered pigments, incorporating his mix of biomorphic and geometric motifs into boldly colored abstract compositions.
Baldassano's paintings are seductive, they are rich and luscious; yet when asked if beauty is an important aspect of his work, the artist replies that it only in the last few years that he has been conscious of this quality. For us viewers, beauty has always been apparent in his oeuvre.
by Cynthia Roznoy ,PHD
Cynthia Roznoy Curator, Mattatuck Museum. Dr. Rosnoy ,now retired has organized more than 20 exhibitions of American Art
Writing in 1997, New York Times art critic William Zimmer identified painterly boldness as a characteristic of Vincent Baldassano's art. "If the wish is to be surrounded by color used with gusto, the paintings and drawings by Vincent Baldassano grant this wish" he wrote. Zimmer further described Baldassano's goal of communication using symbols and rich cultural allusions "even while being an unabashed abstractionist". Looking at Untitled Volcano,1982 (Fig. 1), Zimmer recognized Baldassano's style as inclusive, progressive and reflective of its art historical antecedents.
Vincent Baldassano came to artistic age when American art had much to offer. By the middle of the 1970s there was a wide variety of styles available to the contemporary artist and the forces that have shaped Baldassano's art have come from a large and diverse pool including American modernism, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. His travels abroad, his studies and his teaching also have had an impact. When asked what historical artists have influenced his sensibility, Baldassano identifies Kandinsky, Marsden Hartley, and Arthur Dove. Baldassano has developed an art strongly based on precedents while clearly recognizable as his own.
A student at New York's Wagner College in the first half of the 1960s, Baldassano switched his major from pre-med/biology to art; he studied painting with Tom Young an Abstract Expressionist and drawing with Bill White, a classicist. He considered medical illustration as a profession but while sketching a canvas at grad school in Oregon in 1964 he says, he recognized his life's work, "I saw myself doing this for the rest of my life" he said. His student work was mostly figurative with an emphasis on the female nude both in painting and sculpture; he produced a series of Florescent Nudes and of bronze Fertility Goddesses (Fig. 2) referencing the Paleolithic era Venus of Willendorf (Fig. 3). Baldassano was at this time also considering graduate studies in art history.
Back in New York by the last years of the 1960s, Baldassano further explored the nude figure, eventually distorting the form and combining it with organic, biomorphic shapes. A work from this period demonstrates a progression towards abstraction that totally loses the nude and focuses on anthropomorphic forms. The beautifully executed drawing Niagara # 2,1967 (Fig. 4) reveals the artist's interest in the interaction and intersection of shapes as they move in, out and around each other.
Delicately colored and gently surreal, the work on paper brings to mind the rhythmic and imaginative work of Catalan Joan Miro, especially his work of the 1930s such as Composition, Small Universe (Fig. 5) whose work Baldassano viewed during his extensive European travels during this period.
These anthropomorphic works announce Baldassano's expressionist urge that culminates in the sensual works of the 1980s and onward. But an aesthetic discovery detour came first—a combined effort of sculpture and painting that resulted in polychromed shaped canvases and cut-out paintings.
Tintinnabulation (Fig. 6) is typical of the boldly colored shaped canvases of the 1970s that were based on dissection of geometric forms. Here, Baldassano cut a cube into modular pieces and used an isometric perspective of three equal axes at right angles to each other in re-arranging the pieces.
This group of works also included sculptural cubes that sat on the floor as well as vertical sculptures that used linear elements like metal tubes to link canvases with pedestal bases such as Untitled (Fig. 7) that are contemporary to the Nana figures that Niki de Saint Phalle began making in 1965 as seen in Dancing Nana (Fig. 8)
During the 1970s Baldassano both enjoyed artistic success and suffered personal loss. He exhibited with the Allan Frumkin Gallery in New York City and at the Albright Knox Gallery in Buffalo where he had moved in 1968. The loft studio on Elmwood Avenue was in a bohemian section of that city that attracted artists and Baldassano enjoyed a group of artist friends that included Richard Gubernick, Robert Flock, Joe Piccillo, and Seymour Drumelvitch. Unfortunately a gas explosion and fire at this space in 1972 destroyed approximately 99% of Baldassano's work. The artist's experience of the trauma is shown in Afterblaze (Fig. 9),
which though witty and humorous, shows an exploding blue center that is interrupted with a discharge of black holes that absorb everything in its space similar to the way fire consumes all in its path.
Baldassano speaks with fondness of his trip to Portugal in 1972-73. Though always a traveler and lover of all things European, this trip allowed him to meet and work with a group of artists that were especially empathetic and challenging. The Portuguese artists Bravo and Lapa and Canadians Greg Connelly, a photographer and Thom Sokoloski, a conceptual artist formed a short-lived but important camaraderie. A promised exhibition at Lisbon's Galleries Judith DaCruz fell apart when the gallery was closed during the 1974 Portuguese Revolution and all paintings consigned to that gallery disappeared.
Upon his return to Buffalo, Baldassano founded BAM, the Buffalo Art Movement. One of the culminating events was a "Happening" at an opening at the Albright Knox Art Gallery. His artistic focus was still centered on his cutout paintings though they now seemed to have gained an inner life that had elements moving in and out and around each other as in Tennanah Lake (Fig. 10) and Untitled Watercolor, 1976 (Fig. 11) reminiscent of his 1968 drawing Niagara #8, 1976 (Fig. 3).
The late 1970s brought happiness in his marriage to Carole, his move to New York City, and the beginning of family life. His East Village studio was their home and a popular meeting place for friends. Always collegial and supportive of other artists, Baldassano founded the Manhattan Breakfast Club (see photo Fig. 12) a group of like-minded sorts including artists, writers and poets. By the end of this decade Baldassano was experimenting anew making collages and returning to the rectangular canvas.
Perhaps more than any other series in cementing Baldassano's stylistic maturity is the group of works titled the American Indian Series begun in 1984. These lushly colored, expressionistic abstractions were a longtime fermenting and have their conceptual origin in Baldassano's graduate student years in Eugene, Oregon 1964-65. There, the artist shared a studio with Peter Quaempts, a Native American of the Yakima tribe who provided Baldassano with a significant understanding of the American Indian in the Northwest. His embrace of this subject matter led to a new pictorial vocabulary that is a synthesis of easily-read image and abstraction. Mandan Village Swing (Fig. 13), a large-scale mixed-media work, incorporates Native American motifs evocative of tribal camp life. A subtle but significant feature of the work is the use of small, glued paper pieces, a reminder of Baldassano's appreciation for collage.
A very different type of abstract art was making headway in America during this era: the post-painterly abstraction of artists like Frank Stella and Kenneth Noland whose goal was to produce a complete, non-referential object. As a whole, Baldassano eschewed this style and its path to Minimalism. Painting has a poetic purpose for him that requires an expressive element similar to Marsden Hartley, an artist that Baldassano admires. After contact in 1913 with the German group of avant-garde artists known as the Blue Rider, and particularly with Wassily Kandinsky, Hartley embraced modernism and developed an abstract style that combined cubism, new color theories and emotional content. Perhaps most well known of Hartley's works are those of the World War I period--his War Motif pictures such as the Whitney Museum's Painting, No. 5. However, Hartley also found richness in the Native American cultural traditions as seen in his 1914 painting Indian Fantasy (Fig. 14).
When we look at works from each of Hartley's and Baldassano's American Indian series we see they share a common painterly vocabulary in the abstracted and simplified forms, non-naturalistic color, and dynamic pictorial structure. Baldassano's Modern Dance at Red Mountain (Fig. 15)
furthers the use of Indian motifs as it celebrates the land that is part of the Yakima Valley in central Washington state, home of the Yakima Indian reservation. The motifs found in Baldassano's Native American Series evolve into volcanoes--East Village,1982/83 from the Volcano Series (Fig. 16),
celebrations of the artists' children--Francesca's Fantasy (Fig. 17),
and salutes to nourishment as in Zinger Tea Blues (Fig. 18).
The triangular forms continue in Baldassano's art to the present day but perhaps the concluding piece of the Native American Series is the reverential painting Yakima Friend (Fig. 19)
done in 2003 when the artist learned of the death of his friend Peter Quaempts. This elegiac work was preceded by the evocative Homage to Bravo (Fig.29) produced in 1990 at the time of the Portuguese artist's demise.
An art advocate as well as an artist, Baldassano has nurtured artists through gallery exhibitions from his early career. This sort of opportunity expanded in the 1990s as owner/director of the Station Gallery in Katonah, New York where he showcased the work of Black Mountain artist Bill McGee, a friend and influence on Baldassano's career. Later as director of the Silvermine Art Guild and Gallery in Norwalk, Connecticut, Baldassano organized more than sixty exhibitions before taking the helm at the Connecticut GraphicArts Print Center. But these administrative responsibilities did not keep him from art-making. At this time Baldassano produced a 4 x 16 foot ceramic tile mural and began the Habitat Series (Fig. 21) a group of beehive-shaped tombs with hermaphroditic implications in its combination of openings and protrusions.
Painting continued in the motif-laden abstract style but moved between large-scale works, some more than 10 foot long, to small encaustic panels that carried a bold lushness beyond their diminutive size as with Long Boat Key (Fig. 22).
With the millennium, Baldassano moved, once again, this time making his home in Oxford, Connecticut where his gracious residence belies its farmhouse origins and where a handsome barn serves as studio, storage, and gallery. One can catch him there between his teaching stints at New York's National Academy of Design and New Haven's Gateway Community College. That is, if he is home from travels to Europe. A trip to Italy in 2006 allowed him the opportunity to the study buon fresco technique with the celebrated Alberto Felici and Stephano Bresci in Florence and Castelfalfi. While in Italy Baldassano made an edition of prints at the Bottega Tintoretto with Roberto Mazetto that indicate the influence of Giotto and Taddeo Gaddi, and he studied egg tempera technique during visit to Florence, Venice, and Lucca in 2007. A remarkable outcome of these recent trips was the return of the figure to his work as seen in Figure After Taddeo Gaddi and Female Figure (Figs. 23 and 24).
The figure, though, seems to remain secondary subject matter at this time. Today, Baldassano is painting large--Dance of Seven Veils (Fig. 25) measures more than 10 feet--using a variety of media from oil to powered pigments, incorporating his mix of biomorphic and geometric motifs into boldly colored abstract compositions.
Baldassano's paintings are seductive, they are rich and luscious; yet when asked if beauty is an important aspect of his work, the artist replies that it only in the last few years that he has been conscious of this quality. For us viewers, beauty has always been apparent in his oeuvre.
Vincent Baldassano: Journey
By
Lisa Paul Streitfeld
L.P.Streitfeld, s aculturalwriter, curator, educator and pioneer new art forms for the 21st century. For the past decade, she was a regular newspaper critic, interpreting new holistic movement which she spread internationally through her teachings and writings.
Life is a journey. No one knows this better than the artist who leaves behind the relics of individual momentum, a progression towards the holistic integration of inner being and its outer manifestation in material reality.
Vincent Baldassano’s journey rejected the mainstream trends of art in the late 20th century in favor of an undetermined “middle” path. This millennial passage reflected a paradigm shift in which art was declared dead only to be resurrected in a new century.
The study of biology along with art set the course for a progression into a harmonic balance between gender opposites defining a new artistic age. The key can be seen in the “Habitats” series. These early sculptures reveal the artist’s search for the integration of outer and inner in a single unified form.
Early works reveal the artist placing himself in a shared space with his subject matter, the human body. Even this early stage, the work reveals a sensibility for the fluidity of gender and search for androgynous integration. The 1966 Self-Portrait with Model reveals the masculine relationship with the feminine based not on societal models but primitive associations linking the female body as fertility goddess -- large, grounded and connected with the earth itself.
Early experiments into abstraction reveal a complexity of gender inspired forms and shapes interacting and relating in a shared space in which dynamism and movement is the only constant. These biomorphic experiments migrated into geometric forms on gessoed boxes that eventually served as literal containers and new holistic figurations absorbing the duality of gender.
The right brain path led to the flattening of the cube into hexagon, a six-sided shape representing the integration of the opposites. This breakthrough pushed amorphous forms (feminine fertility images) and masculine shapes (pure geometry) back to center. This struggle for reconciliation then organically migrated into isometric constructions, spatial geometries composed on a flat surface. In the following decade, these clean shapes from the seventies became looser and more penetrating into interior space as the outer container became more solidly constructed.
In 1972, Baldessano endured an explosion in his Buffalo studio that destroyed nearly all his work and prompted him to take a sabbatical in Portugal. The Afterblaze painting made prior to his departure proved a harbinger of things to come. During the 1974 Portuguese revolution, he lost all of the new cutout paintings and drawings made in the country.
After moving to SoHo in 1975, the artist began showing his biomorphic forms as cutouts made on canvas. These works succeeded in merging his gender vocabulary within the Pop Art playground of the polka dot. With Tennanah Lake, his style loosened up from the hard-edged rectangular geometry into softer drawings decomposing biomorphic shapes. These sensual and colorful works bridged Pop Art and abstraction with individual motifs such as nipples adorning breast like shapes along with protruding phalluses.
The transformation through fire guiding his life journey at this point was invoked in the Volcano series of the next decade with its tightly compressed energy exploding onto the canvas surface, Texture was fused into his paintings with pigment. Triangles abstracting his earlier expressionist feminine genitals were now absorbed into the narrative as the source of creative power.
These proved to be crucial doorways leading to gender solidifying 1980 constructions.
Works such as the 1980-81 Sweet Bronx depict a process of right/left brain integration between mental shape and instinctual, spontaneous composition in works that were both amorphous yet contained. In the 1984 Brian Street, the opposing gender forms were meeting with nipples as a unifying motif. Here and other works integrated figures through a composition of theatrical arrangements.
By the end of the 1990’s, symbols became front and center in works reflecting the Native American reverence for the four elements of nature.
By the turn of the millennium, the artist was embarked into a search for the quintessential element through an ancient medium, encaustic. This exploration with wax guided him to new levels of superior coloration in his collages.
While engaging in a process of working over traditional symbols through abstraction, the artist explored an ancient form reflecting his desire to isolate and contain the new source of imagery he was mining. In the resulting “Icon” series, Christian iconography was slowly replaced by cross narratives
integrating the relics of a contemporary journey, the merging of figurative and abstraction.
The 2006 “Venice” paintings updated Classicism through fluid and spontaneous narratives superbly integrating color, gouache and collage.
With this free interplay of mediums the artist returned to geometry as a means of establishing a new order in which the feminine (intuition) is integrated with the masculine (reason).
After a 2007 trip to Italy, the Christian monk figures had become ghostlike while central imagery turned to crystal balls obscuring the new uncharted future of a world viewed from the perspective of a universal holism apart from any established religion.
The crowning achievement of this progression is revealed in the recent series, “Doorways,” depicting the destination as the alchemical marriage of opposites. The masculine/feminine, left/right brain integration of drawing geometrical forms on top of abstraction is drenched with resplendent color right on the surface. This mysterious process of transcendence was once attributed to royalty. In the 21st century, it is a state of consciousness available to all who make the journey of integrating internal and external into the unified Self. Vincent Baldassano is the rare artist whose relics of his millennial journey show the way.
By
Lisa Paul Streitfeld
L.P.Streitfeld, s aculturalwriter, curator, educator and pioneer new art forms for the 21st century. For the past decade, she was a regular newspaper critic, interpreting new holistic movement which she spread internationally through her teachings and writings.
Life is a journey. No one knows this better than the artist who leaves behind the relics of individual momentum, a progression towards the holistic integration of inner being and its outer manifestation in material reality.
Vincent Baldassano’s journey rejected the mainstream trends of art in the late 20th century in favor of an undetermined “middle” path. This millennial passage reflected a paradigm shift in which art was declared dead only to be resurrected in a new century.
The study of biology along with art set the course for a progression into a harmonic balance between gender opposites defining a new artistic age. The key can be seen in the “Habitats” series. These early sculptures reveal the artist’s search for the integration of outer and inner in a single unified form.
Early works reveal the artist placing himself in a shared space with his subject matter, the human body. Even this early stage, the work reveals a sensibility for the fluidity of gender and search for androgynous integration. The 1966 Self-Portrait with Model reveals the masculine relationship with the feminine based not on societal models but primitive associations linking the female body as fertility goddess -- large, grounded and connected with the earth itself.
Early experiments into abstraction reveal a complexity of gender inspired forms and shapes interacting and relating in a shared space in which dynamism and movement is the only constant. These biomorphic experiments migrated into geometric forms on gessoed boxes that eventually served as literal containers and new holistic figurations absorbing the duality of gender.
The right brain path led to the flattening of the cube into hexagon, a six-sided shape representing the integration of the opposites. This breakthrough pushed amorphous forms (feminine fertility images) and masculine shapes (pure geometry) back to center. This struggle for reconciliation then organically migrated into isometric constructions, spatial geometries composed on a flat surface. In the following decade, these clean shapes from the seventies became looser and more penetrating into interior space as the outer container became more solidly constructed.
In 1972, Baldessano endured an explosion in his Buffalo studio that destroyed nearly all his work and prompted him to take a sabbatical in Portugal. The Afterblaze painting made prior to his departure proved a harbinger of things to come. During the 1974 Portuguese revolution, he lost all of the new cutout paintings and drawings made in the country.
After moving to SoHo in 1975, the artist began showing his biomorphic forms as cutouts made on canvas. These works succeeded in merging his gender vocabulary within the Pop Art playground of the polka dot. With Tennanah Lake, his style loosened up from the hard-edged rectangular geometry into softer drawings decomposing biomorphic shapes. These sensual and colorful works bridged Pop Art and abstraction with individual motifs such as nipples adorning breast like shapes along with protruding phalluses.
The transformation through fire guiding his life journey at this point was invoked in the Volcano series of the next decade with its tightly compressed energy exploding onto the canvas surface, Texture was fused into his paintings with pigment. Triangles abstracting his earlier expressionist feminine genitals were now absorbed into the narrative as the source of creative power.
These proved to be crucial doorways leading to gender solidifying 1980 constructions.
Works such as the 1980-81 Sweet Bronx depict a process of right/left brain integration between mental shape and instinctual, spontaneous composition in works that were both amorphous yet contained. In the 1984 Brian Street, the opposing gender forms were meeting with nipples as a unifying motif. Here and other works integrated figures through a composition of theatrical arrangements.
By the end of the 1990’s, symbols became front and center in works reflecting the Native American reverence for the four elements of nature.
By the turn of the millennium, the artist was embarked into a search for the quintessential element through an ancient medium, encaustic. This exploration with wax guided him to new levels of superior coloration in his collages.
While engaging in a process of working over traditional symbols through abstraction, the artist explored an ancient form reflecting his desire to isolate and contain the new source of imagery he was mining. In the resulting “Icon” series, Christian iconography was slowly replaced by cross narratives
integrating the relics of a contemporary journey, the merging of figurative and abstraction.
The 2006 “Venice” paintings updated Classicism through fluid and spontaneous narratives superbly integrating color, gouache and collage.
With this free interplay of mediums the artist returned to geometry as a means of establishing a new order in which the feminine (intuition) is integrated with the masculine (reason).
After a 2007 trip to Italy, the Christian monk figures had become ghostlike while central imagery turned to crystal balls obscuring the new uncharted future of a world viewed from the perspective of a universal holism apart from any established religion.
The crowning achievement of this progression is revealed in the recent series, “Doorways,” depicting the destination as the alchemical marriage of opposites. The masculine/feminine, left/right brain integration of drawing geometrical forms on top of abstraction is drenched with resplendent color right on the surface. This mysterious process of transcendence was once attributed to royalty. In the 21st century, it is a state of consciousness available to all who make the journey of integrating internal and external into the unified Self. Vincent Baldassano is the rare artist whose relics of his millennial journey show the way.