Carl Baratta is a brilliant contradiction as an artist: he creates hauntingly evocative black and white work as well as vibrantly colored paintings that recall the palette of Matisse. But regardless of palette or medium, he is above all else a storyteller, offering exciting, inventive, and immersive tales, wonderful visual puzzles for viewers to piece together through their own individual lens.
His vivid painted landscapes are both intensely alien and recognizable, like a jungle in the Amazon transplanted to Southern California.
Some are whimsical, like the friendly creatures and spotted trees in work like “The Tuneless Song of the Ancient Machine.”
Others are more realistic, even in palette, as in the watery scape of “Wrecked 2,” in which an imploring hand adds a touch of the surreal as it rises to the side of a motion-filled scene of flowing aqua-blue water and tumbled brown rock.
He works in acrylic and resin on canvas, or watercolor on paper, or mixes acrylic with watercolor, or watercolor with tempura. His energetic use of color and line form a rhythm that pull the viewer into his world, dream-like and fecund, rich with image and imagination.
Water, forest, and flower are his main characters. In “The Evil Tree of the Naked Heart,” trees like yellow bananas emerge from a lush tropical green forest, while a blanket of red with protruding golden plants floats above a tangle of roots or branches in another work, white waves flowing in the foreground.
The overall vibe of all Baratta’s color work is of a visionary landscape, a world imprinted just beneath that which most of us see, with the dullness of the everyday stripped away, leaving behind a fantastical dream state.
Of course, it would be a mistake to look at only the artist’s full color works. His monochrome drawings are equally pulsing with story, life, and a compelling inner reality. “La Pipe Creep,” a recent graphite on paper image, features a semi-circle of people surrounded by a sky dominated with massive curls of smoke exuding from one man’s pipe.
His wildly wooded landscape in “The Once Lovers” dominates the center of a beautifully shaded monochrome landscape, with a man hurrying off to the left, while a woman follows far to the right – a story of two people far apart in this tangled wood, yet still heading in the same direction.
Baratta also frequently draws and paints plein air impressions, as in the delicate pastel colors barely there in a black and white world, in the lovely “Berlin Forest, Hollywood Hills Heading North.”
He also creates a kind of instant folklore in black and white woodblock prints, such as in the “The Alphabet Found in Stones,” in which a bird perches on a branch, below it a nest with another bird on the edge.
The intricately detailed woodblock print “Awake, Awake, Deborah: Awake, Awake, Utter a Song!” has at its center a perfectly rendered arched brick bridge, but the soul of the piece is the floating visage of a woman against the sky.
His artistic storytelling knows no bounds, from references to Norse mythology to Sienese gothic style. And no matter the medium, so much heart fills this artist’s work that it seems to overflow, whether working in the most brilliant of acrylic hues on an other-worldly landscape, shaping evocative graphite sketches, or painting lightly colored plein air landscapes. In each image, Baratta exudes a deep joy in being alive, and in sharing his lovely, unique vision of the world.
If his work as an artist wasn’t enough, he spreads the same kind of exuberant, slightly surreal joy in his curations and through large-scale exhibitions that surround viewers with a sense of fun and mystery in the familiar. In High Beams, an on-going series of exhibitions held in parking lots and roof-tops, members of different art collectives and galleries offer inventive, themed work in robust, massive pop-up settings. As a member of Tiger Strikes Asteroid Los Angeles, he also organizes gallery exhibitions in multiple cities globally through the TSLA network, and B-LA Connect.
Watching Baratta’s visual stories unfold in any way at all, you’ll enter an entirely new realm vibrating with a passion of life and art. It’s a great deal of fun to be privileged to step inside.
- Genie Davis; photos: Genie Davis; and as provided by Carl Baratta