Review of Carl Baratta's Sweet Water at Lloyd Dobler

Carl Baratta's exhibition of new work entitled Sweet Water, currently on display at Lloyd Dobler until April 28th, is by all means a showcasing of contradiction. While Baratta's newest paintings seem to offer up a multiple course meal of intriguing processes, content, and aesthetics, there is a slight hitch in that all of these elements ultimately lead to a vacuous cancellation of coherence.

The paintings in Sweet Water are almost all relatively small-scale works of egg tempera, gouache, and watercolor on boards. The exception of course is the 5' x 10' leviathan entitled You're never Going to Make It, & No One's Gonna Help You that dominates an entire wall of Lloyd Dobler's modestly sized space. Baratta looks to landscape for subject matter and depicts hellish looking forests with hidden figures and withered trees in a style reminiscent of both childish naivety and art brut. Already we have a perplexing contradiction as the aesthetic inclinations of a kindergardener collide with this Ballardian atrocity exhibition, a collision that synthesizes little more than a quick shock that is soon made predictable by repetition. One might hazard a guess that the use of egg tempera, an ennobled medium, juxtaposed with puerile application of the paint leads to interest. But again, the disturbing and subtly anthropomorphic landscapes of Baratta's paintings prevent the egg tempera-rendered childishness from forming a dialectical unity. It is in fact this nearly dialectical relationship that annulled my last hope of finding a concrete message of ecological activism in the artist's decapitated trees; how could one possibly incite a political implication in a painting that looks as if it were made by a 5-year old schizophrenic obsessed with the materiality of non-secular Byzantine art?

This show is essentially a series of near encounters and non-sequiturs, brushes with cohesion that never quite resolve themselves. A patron going to see Sweet Water will likely come away from the exhibition pondering on a plethora of eclectic (and admittedly interesting) topics that nonetheless Baratta has unfortunately failed to address with more than a brief and infinitely vague allusion.