Baras is a young artist with an old soul. Perhaps the immigrant experience informs her
persona, arcing generations of Russian Jews relocating to the Promised Land of
the New York art world.
Baras
is not your typical, well-rounded visual artist. Her monkish devotion to
esoterica, psyche, and nature coalesce as iconographic altarpieces, harkening
to her Russian/Jewish origins. There is a focus on low-tech materials. Her
imagery is devoid of cynical gestures or any overt quest for political
relevance.
She
is not concerned with décor, or becoming fashionably elite. These are
encouraging traits in an artist just beginning to catch on, and indicates a
creative identity oblivious to the distractions of art as a day job.
Baras’
vernacular vocabulary effectively informs her content; folksy references to
rustic emblems enable the casual offhandedness seen in her impastoed frames. The
artist’s informal technique lends an outsider feel to the textured reliefs.
Some surfaces are rooted in craft-like traditions of weaving and stitching, invoking
references to peasant culture.
Yet
there is a compellingly sublime undertow of mystical provenance. Baras uses
color to imbue a sensation of nature and atmosphere, which manifest as
landscape felt through a highly charged notion of ancestral memory. This
essence of chroma as a succinct psychic property, informs the artist’s work with
an indistinct sentiment, seemingly historical in origin.
There
is an inherent dichotomy of intimacy and detachment. The pieces are not
personal biographical narratives. They project a chilly sensitivity, you
don’t cozy up to her compositions, so much as decipher them. Baras’ symbolist
iconology tends to dictate a certain message; belief that physicality of
medium can trans-mutate into spiritual revelation.
Her
work becomes most accomplished when her scratchy engraving carves into darkly
brooding backgrounds that anchor child-like semiotics. Yet these are not simplistic
images. They may recall lost notions, but encompass dense moments of intuitive
prowess. They could be dream-like visions of the material world transformed, channeled
through the sludge of the here and now. The
tracks Baras leaves with her cryptic placards lead us to the inevitable
conclusion that this artist has found a path she can follow.
