"Our Ancestors"

As a symbolist, Jake Baddeley's artworks court hermeneutic danger or as philosopher Chuck Dyke likes to say are in danger of being "hermeneutered" by the viewing public. Pictures that are rich in interpretive possibilities are often seen only for those possibilities, to the exclusion of the aesthetic dimension, as if art could or should be reduced merely to language. "What do you think it means?" followed by some stumbling exegesis or recherché response. This is not only stereotype, but the way we're taught to view art, and Baddeley's pieces need to be seen not only on that level but also on the level of the purely visual.

Almost Freudian, and certainly in a sense surrealist, Baddeley's symbolism is taken from the subliminal. However, it's not simply the misty indistinctness of standard dream interpretation. While the juxtaposition of pieces certainly arises from the science of sleep - a logic that has no founding axioms - their expression, their form, is as unlike dreams as it gets . In this vividness, there's almost something definitively Italian about his paintings: Da Vinci or Calvino lurking in the background somewhere, a connection to an antiquity that belies his British roots.

-Andrew Beckerman