Works by Steven Baris

Steven Baris’ (US) painting Jump Cut E1 (2018), from his series “Expanded Diagrams,” manifests the internal logic of painting. It is a diagram: in C.S. Peirce’s definition, a sign representing a set of implicit relations that can be perceived. Baris’ painting refers to the relations among its elements, such as right angles, straight lines, breaks, and that wonderful lemon yellow mingling, in time, with black. Once Baris has established the rules, his role is creatively limited to decisions about color, size, and most important, time: how long to allow the diagramming process to take place. Innocently, inexorably, the painting sets its own process in place and allows it to unfold.