[Many thanks to Peter Jordens for bringing this item to our attention.] Amelia Mason (WBUR) reviews Firelei Báez’s exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art. [Also see previous post Art Exhibition: Firelei Báez ICA.]

My favorite painting in the new Firelei Báez exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston is the one with the horses — mainly because it doesn’t appear to involve horses at all. An abstract whirl of color splashes across the bottom of the canvas like crashing waves and bursts toward the top of the painting like fire. But study the image for more than a moment and shapes begin to appear: the large haunches of a charging horse bloom on the left, while on the right, its elegant snout emerges like a shadow from behind a splash of gold.

Pretty soon, all you can see are the outlines of horses, winking in and out of the canvas like a mirage, all surging toward some unseen point beyond the painting’s edge. Maybe it’s a stampede of horses, kicking up dust or galloping across a creek. Study it even more closely, and you’ll notice that the entire painting is rendered on top of another image, a reproduction of a set of historical playing cards dedicated to the 17th-century Grand Dauphin of France.

It’s a remarkable painting, not just for its formal achievement — Báez’s ability to conjure a stampede of horses without actually painting a single complete horse — but for the way that it reveals itself, slowly, continuously, even after the viewer has walked away. Báez has said that she was inspired by the many heraldic paintings and sculptures she encountered during a residency in Rome. Those horses were depicted as tools of conquest, whereas the animals in her painting are wild — and quite literally disrupting the tidy historical narrative from which they’ve been wrested.

During a walkthrough of the exhibit on Tuesday, Báez revealed another Easter egg: the bodies of Italian dragonflies that flew into her studio and got stuck to the canvas while she was working on the painting. Her paintings, she explained, “are actually physical markers of where I’ve been, and of the environment, and in that way, more like portrait than anything else.”

The piece, titled “Untitled (Les tables de geographie reduites en un jeu de cartes),” is part of a sweeping mid-career survey of Báez’s work that opened at the ICA on April 4. Báez, who is now based in New York, grew up in Miami and the Dominican Republic to Dominican and Haitian parents. Much of her work deals with the troubled historical narratives of the Caribbean. Often, it takes the form of an imagined or mythological intervention with received knowledge from the region’s colonial past — a splash of color, as it were, on a deck of old playing cards.

Báez, whose work is the subject of another large survey at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, is having a moment. Almost three years ago, the ICA mounted a huge immersive sculptural work of hers at its Watershed location in East Boston, and it was then that Eva Respini (at the time the ICA’s deputy director and chief curator) started thinking about a survey of Báez’s paintings. [. . .]

Read full review at https://www.wbur.org/news/2024/04/04/firelei-baez-ica-boston-newsletter

[Shown above: Firelei Báez, “Untitled (Les tables de géographie réduites en un jeu de cartes),” 2022. (Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, New York; photo by Jackie Furtado).]