John Baldessari

MART, Trento
Through March 11

The works of John Baldessari, presented here at MART as the artist’s first Italian retrospective, emerge from a desire to develop an expressive language able to reproduce the multi-faceted nature of reality. The artist first developed this concept at the end of the ’60s, when he started to explore the infinite opportunities offered by photography. The early stages of his artistic career were marked by studied sequences of images—assembled in an apparently irrational way—and realistic representations of everyday incidents. The works were completed and, in a certain sense, defined by short caption-texts that undermined the idea which the image itself transmitted.

This sense of destabilization that the artist had begun to investigate here is taken much further in his works from the ’80s to the point at which it subverts the very elements from which the image is composed. Baldessari moves away from a rigid and spatially definable concept of the artwork, creating works from fragments of images that he places randomly in space or presenting photographs on which he has scrawled various colored signs and symbols.

The reassuring appearance of film stills or photographs taken from everyday life loses its stability, becoming an intricate weave of different visual languages. If an exhaustive definition of reality is impossible—because one cannot take into consideration the multitude of perspectives through which it can be recognized—it is, therefore, impossible to even consider a representation that is not partial or limited in some way. Baldessari’s most recent works seem consolidate his earlier explorations.

In the series "Overlap,"the superimposition of iconic elements, along with colored marks and signs, has been conceived on a large scale and the technique perfected employing technology’s latest tools. In works such as Trophy: red, yellow, blue or Agreement: flash, red, yellow, blue, the artist has intervened in a manner that is minimal yet significant: a colored stamp blocks out the subject of a black-and-white photograph, thus impeding an immediate reading. Having reached the point of near synthesis along a path that has not yet reached its conclusion, these latest works reinforce the notion that Baldessari’s use of images is focused on revealing their inadequacy.




Francesca Turchetto
Translation by Rosalind Furness