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Conversations with DonALD BAeCHLer
«Geographical paintings,» Donald Baechler sometimes calls his work, «paintings with origins in other
places, in someone else’s history.» Superimposing associations with foreign cultures onto his paintings, Donald
Baechler does not focus on content or style, but rather seeks to evoke an attitude! «I don’t understand
my paintings,» the artist confesses openly. «It’s not an ideal world. It’s never a world that is full of much of
anything. The faces, the flowers, the characters. Perhaps they are a kind of diagram of isolation, in a way.
It’s like a child locked in a room with one toy.» Thus began my series of conversations with this gentle yet
brilliant individual.
Baechler was born in Hartford, Connecticut, on November 22, 1956. From 1974 to 1977, he studied at the
Maryland Institute of Art in Baltimore, followed by further periods of study at the Cooper Union, New York,
in 1977-78 and at the Städelschule in Frankfurt/Main in 1978-79. He lives and works in New York City. His extensive
portfolio includes paintings, drawings and sculptures that I personally adore. Especially in his many
prints and engravings, Baechler has, with characteristic wit and humor, created a metaphorical language of a
popular culture that has gained him a widely held reputation – almost at the same time as Keith Haring and
Jean-Michel Basquiat – as a second-generation pop artist. Technical versatility is what sets Baechler apart.
In his choice of subjects, he follows a set repertoire, returning repeatedly to specific motifs, but rendering
them in an array of techniques and materials. He treats drawings, paintings and sculpture as independent,
self-contained genres. Baechler works with formal principles filtered out of what he calls collective memory.
Tulips and playing cards, the repeated representation of a fir tree, a potted plant in a childlike formal language…
These are just a few examples of Baechler’s motifs.
His imagination has a history, as yet unwritten, and it has a geography, as yet only dimly visible. There is
no need to describe his studio: the artist’s consciously self-effacing circumstances seem utterly irrelevant.
The very act of creating a painting is kept at arm’s length. You will seldom find Baechler without a pad and a
felt-tip pen, however. At the end of any given evening, he thus returns with pockets full of crude, hastily jotted
sketches. Intriguingly, the artist would seem almost to prefer that other non-artist friends make drawings for
him. «I try to get outside myself as much as possible, outside my habits. I’m interested in different ways of putting
lines together, ways that would never occur to me, that have nothing to do with my own nature, inclination
or training.» Baechler looks for ideas and stimulus outside his own level of perception, looking for inspiration to
his collection of books of Art Brut, children’s drawings, art of the insane, even scrawls on latrine walls – images
alien to all educated tradition. Though he never seeks to portrait his subjects (actually preferring to avoid doing
so), Donald Baechler’s paintings often revolve around one solitary individual, perhaps a surrogate for the artist
himself, set adrift in an intentionally vague, if not enigmatic then certainly unexplained relationship to another
object or objects: an emblematic globe, a ball, a gyroscope, a candle, sometimes the cut-out profile of a tree or
a flower. «Reduced circumstances, to say the least. There is never an intention of likeness,» in his own words.
His work has more to do with setting a stage than depicting a scene, a stage on which the artist’s lexicon
of images makes its appearance. Even so, Baechler openly avows his love of minimalism and of the
conceptual practices of the 1970s. «I have never rejected anything.»
Donald Baechler’s international success is rooted in his very distinctive artistic expression and, as
we saw earlier, his technical versatility. In his latest works, he concentrates on a small number of symbolic
motifs which he features in various forms taken from differing contexts. He uses motifs such as flowers
or fir trees and transforms them using different techniques. His artistic expression reflects traditional genre
boundaries and design patterns, which he then subtly undermines with his creations. Each piece of his work demonstrates
an impressively structured openness while successfully performing a delicate balancing act between
shape and color, tactile presence and reduction.
His latest venture with Wes Lang – «Skulls and Shit» – impresses in another way: It takes considerable visual
intelligence to manipulate an image as clichéd as a skull. Yet Baechler has always maintained a keen aptitude for
rendering what he considers commonplace items. Every generation tends to harbor some apocalyptic scenario
unique to its time and to a given place. So it is no surprise to see Baechler’s skulls sporting halos, slowly coming
into focus as a final reminder that commercial prizes are just another vain denial of a shared mortality.
I asked Donald what makes a great artist. His answer was frank, disarming – and hit the nail on the head: «I think
a good artist, in general, is someone who doubts what he’s doing and looks for ways of doing it better and making
it even more interesting.»
I wonder what he’ll do next?
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