Rita Baragona - “Seen Through Time”
Moment to Moment Garden (diptych detail), mixed media/paper, 11.75" x 30", 2022
Exhibition Dates: November 29, 2022 – December 30, 2022
Opening Reception: Saturday, December 3, 2022, 3:00-6:00 p.m.
Gallery Talk: In Conversation with Lohin and Nemtzow, Dec. 10, 2022, 3:00 p.m.
The Bowery Gallery is pleased to present Rita Baragona’s recent paintings and drawings of oceans, flower-based still lives and gardens. These are highly energetic, exquisitely sensitive paintings, alive with luminous color and lyrical lines which create rhythmic spatial movement.
Some of the current works are painted directly from nature in a moment-to-moment conversation between Baragona’s eye, her subject, and the painting surface. Other works combine direct perception with accrued memories of her subject matter. Most recently Baragona has created complex compositions by combining paintings done of the same place but at different times. In these works, Baragona walks the viewer through the ever-changing appearance of the natural world.
Baragona’ curiosity about scientific ideas such as the relationship between energy and matter and the neurology of perception help inform her vision. With color and brushstroke, she makes visible to the viewer the conundrum of energetic impermanence within the appearance of solidity. As she explains, My colors become a metaphor for the energy that underlies mass, and my rhythmic marks indicate the ongoing changes which I perceive in nature.
In her single flower drawings, she observes flowers unfolding slowly, so slowly that time expands. On the other hand, the dynamic flux of the waves in her ocean pictures flow quickly and dynamically. Time passing coalesces into aesthetic visual harmonies. Even Baragona’s tiniest subjects feel large. Incisive marks and notes of color impart a remarkable presence. …Taking in these intense images, we may find our senses elasticized, our awareness deepened by the artist’s perceptions. This is what it means to see. John Goodrich, The Eye’s Mind, 2015