Two Artists' Takes on Swimming
Ed Baynard at James Fuentes Gallery and Ed Ruscha at the Flag Art Foundation
Ed Baynard - Fire Island Pines 1981 at James Fuentes through July 19, 2024
Designing a logo has always struck me as an impossible task. You have to condense so much—a company or product’s identity, function, and aesthetic—into a bite-sized, elegant image that can float through the world without any supporting context. (The Nike Swoosh means Nike no matter where you see it—with or without shoes or a basketball.) The project of a painter is the opposite. It involves creating an image that is its own world for the viewer to enter. Ed Baynard, an accomplished painter with work in the collection of basically every major American museum, also worked as a graphic designer, making t-shirts and posters for Jimmy Hendrix and The Beatles. In his colored-pencil drawings of Fire Island at James Fuentes, he manages to square these decidedly opposing additive and negative approaches to picture making.
His drawing of a picnic blanket sits off-center on a page, surrounded by blank space—no sand for context. The colors are piercing against the white—crossing-guard-vest yellow and gingham blue. It’s as if he sees the world in discrete parts that can be stacked together like legos rather than an irreducible whole. Many of his subjects, like the blanket, cut right into white background, as does another drawing of red fish-shaped kites stranded not in the sky, but in empty space. In some drawings, Baynard will complete a full painterly vision, coloring from corner to corner. Even in those cases, however, his subjects are contained within skinny rectangles that take up less than half the white page.
There are no people in his pictures either, as if he is following the religious design strategy of aniconism, where divine figures, too holy to be depicted directly, have their presence indicated by their trace (like the Buddha suggested by his footsteps). In Baynard’s case, there are shadows of beachgoers on a plywood fence, an empty lawn chair, towels hanging on a rack—but no sunbathers or swimmers. Did he draw these the day after an alien abduction or is there just no one home? They’re not so much pictures of what it’s like to relax on the beach as a logo for the experience. No ads for beach resorts show the hour-long quest for parking or the menus of overpriced margaritas. But while Club-Med ads are sensationalized fiction, Baynard’s pictures, though illusively curated, feel true to life.
The Swimmer at the Flag Art Foundation through August 9, 2024
In The Swimmer at the Flag Art Foundation, another Ed (Ruscha) focuses on pools over beaches. Among work by a number of heavy hitters—including Katherine Bradford, Cindy Sherman, and Paul Thek—Ruscha’s series of photographs Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass stands out as a portrait of middle class leisure. The photos were published as a mass-produced book (Ruscha was insistent on the work being accessible to anyone), but here they are hung in a three-by-three square. Ruscha, like Baynard, also trained as a graphic designer, honing his aesthetic sense as a participant in the creation of the American consumerist visual landscape. As an artist, this instinct has led him to brilliantly capture the eerie beauty of sheer color blocks in signs, concrete buildings, and, here, pools. The pools hog their compositions with oblong shapes of pure over-chlorinated blue. But not a soul appears to be enjoying them. Only one image even hints at human presence, with wet stains on the concrete beside a diving board. The water is radiant and almost feels artificial, possibly radioactive, which begs the question: are they even meant for swimming?