Drawings

William Bailey's still life and figure drawings are deceptive. At first acquaintance, they seem to be straightforward, truthful, albeit notably disciplined responses to things seen. With longer viewing, they not only reveal more subtleties but they also seem to distance themselves from mere actuality. It becomes increasingly clear that the images before us are neither straightforward nor truthful—in the usual sense of accurately recapitulating the visible—but rather, they are intensely cerebral inventions, distillations of countless perceptions, evaluations, choices, and rejections into what might be called "abstract figurations." It's plain that Bailey is deeply attached to the nuances of visual experience. He conjures up the weight, mass, and surfaces of the things around us, yet for his all fascination with the seen, his drawings are not simply dispassionate comments on whatever has captured his attention. Quite the contrary, he seems to present us with profoundly felt reports from another universe that only he has been privileged to enter. Bailey brings us glimpses of a kind of way-station between the abstract realm of perfect Platonic archetypes and the irregular objects and flawed bodies of our ordinary existence. The tabletops of his still lifes are inhabited by bowls, pitchers, and pots at once completely familiar and more elegant, harmonious, and refined than anything we are likely to find on our own domestic shelves. His nudes seem both eminently human and formed according to a strict canon of geometric proportions, as if an ideal Platonic archetype were declaring its presence beneath the envelope of flesh.

For all the individuality of Bailey's work, his drawings are deeply informed by his understanding of the history of art. His affection is palpable for such severe masters of the still life as Paul Cézanne, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, and Giorgio Morandi—all of them artists dedicated to suggesting the pure geometric underpinnings of the quotidian. Like these chosen ancestors, Bailey has, over the years, assembled a group of still life objects that serve him as a cast of characters. As we do in Morandi's still lifes or those of Cézanne or Chardin, we come to recognize particular objects—a footed dish, a striped bowl, a white pitcher, a water jug—the way we recognize the personages of the commedia dell'arte. But far from using his players as stock figures in time-honored situations, Bailey treats his objects like a troupe of experienced, versatile actors whom he employs, like an inspired director, as the protagonists in a series of diverse dramas. Some of these dramas are relatively familiar, others new, but all follow strict forms and all, it seems, are extremely serious. Bailey's preference for arranging his still life objects (and often his figures) in stately filades across a shallow, stage-like space heightens the theatrical analogy. So does his making the front edge of his still life tables congruent with the surface of the paper, which turns the tabletop into a playing surface and the boundaries of the sheet into a proscenium. The confrontational, often low viewpoint Bailey adopts for his still lifes intensifies our sense of being present at a performance, seated in the audience, focused on a play that has not yet begun.

Bailey's figures are as self-contained as his still life objects and are often shown in spaces as shallow as those occupied by his pitchers and bowls. Firm-fleshed and not particularly agile, his nudes and clothed women can recall the chunky figures in Gustave Courbet's paintings; like them, they seem solemn, relaxed, and alert, but not poised for action. We suspect that if Bailey's women did move, it would be slowly and with great dignity. We think, too, of the stately, eloquently simplified figures in Piero della Francesca's or Georges Seurat's work. Like these masters, Bailey eliminates everything that is not essential to evoking the human body. Yet while the anatomy and features of his figures announce that they are governed by reason and geometry, devoid of reference to the irregular, the overly specific, or the anecdotal, the figures also seem to...