For this exhibition, San Diego artist Richard Baker presents a new series of paintings entitled Interior Exteriors. After several years of work in the digital medium, Baker returns to his roots with paintings that are a reaction to and a synthesis of his experiences creating interactive art. Through his paintings of the vessel, Baker like Giorgio Morandi is able to mediate a relationship between the vast formal possibilities of painting a singular shape and the simple nature of this shape as object and structure. While Baker’s vessel paintings represent his desire as an artist to separate from technology as a tool for making art, his paintings of place represent an embrace of this same technology as an apparatus important in creating art. Baker’s place paintings began as three-dimensional models of imagined landscapes, a technical reflection on nature’s component parts and became alterations of perspective space edited and added to with paint. These paintings of place confound one’s expectations of photographic, digital and painted “reality” and represent the neo-romantic view of landscape suggested by Thomas Cole.
