Nicolas Baier

Issue 23, June 2008

Jessica Bradley Art & Projects, Toronto
3 April – 3 May

Review by Andrea Carson

Large, Gothic, silvery-grey rectangles of various dimensions cover the front wall in Jessica Bradley's small gallery. Up close, the works reveal themselves as 14 individual photographic scans of watermarked mirrors; their capacity for reflection has been removed, leaving only ashlike remains. From a series titled Vanités (2007–8), these are an example of Montreal artist Nicolas Baier's wildly creative work. "It's as though reflecting was exhausting", says Baier of the mirrors, which – as with most works in this exhibition – function as pareidolia, urging the viewer to find wonder in the commonplace.

Like a magician who takes a penny in one hand and releases a dove seconds later, Baier delights in the unexpected. "We only see what we know," he says. "Is doing the contrary the artist's challenge?" Baier began as a painter, but soon transformed into a self-described bricoleur – a cutter, paster, digitaliser and big dreamer to whom it occurred to take along a camera. He uses photography as a tool, setting few boundaries and mixing media as he pleases. In fact, he feels closer to a painter (who builds images) than to a photographer (who merely captures them). All the works in this show but one – a photograph – are high-resolution scans, mounted on steel, Sintra and Plexiglas. Baier is less interested in truth than in perception. "A piece of art almost always works as a mirror," he says. "People see and perceive themselves by exploring, by subconsciously rummaging through their knowledge and experiences."

Two excellent examples hang in the back gallery. Paésine 1 (2008) is a scan of a polished fragment of Florentine marble whose pattern and rich earth tones swirl together to become a desert scene or a Dalí painting. Baier has trimmed the object to its circumference, stipulating that the wall sculpture be reversed occasionally, upon which it becomes, perhaps, a seascape. The large, pale La Formation des Nuages (2007), a scan of watermarked paper the artist found covering the windows of an abandoned shop, is an uncanny, contradictory piece, at once crinkled and smooth, and symmetrically blotted like a Rorschach test. Evoking watermarks, clouds and a kind of spiritual Minimalism, it possesses what Michael Fried, in his 1967 essay 'Art and Objecthood', calls theatricality: 'It is… as though the work in question has an inner, even secret, life.'

Baier's influences include Agnes Martin, an abstract expressionist often misconstrued as minimalist, whom he quotes as saying, 'My paintings are… about what is known forever in the mind.' Baier's White (2005) – not in the present exhibition – offers perhaps the clearest insight into his hyperexperimental mind. He selected an image from a series of photographs of trees, and eventually saturated the whites so that hardly any distinct detail remained. He says, "I had to leave the minimum of traces – to leave room for memory." Baier's admiration for Martin's work is significant, for the late artist also said, 'Artwork is a representation of our devotion to life… the enormous pitfall is devotion to oneself instead of to life. All works that are self-devoted are absolutely ineffective.' And Baier's complex and multifaceted oeuvre is, unquestionably, devoted to life.