Steven Baris

Steven Baris is an artist working in Philadelphia.The paintings are oil and acrylic. I suggest going to his website and looking at each series. Each one shows an intense and focused exploration of ideas and attributes. I am attracted to the wonderful use of color, space and use of transparency and opaqueness.




Statement:

I characterize my paintings as spatial images. Space is the lens through which I best visualize the contemporary moment. Even more, it is how I make sense of my own biography, having grown up in decidedly non-urban spaces of Indian reservations throughout the West. Having since migrated to the most extensively built-up region of the continent, I have become interested in the derivative spaces of thoroughly constructed environments. My paintings attend to the spatial consequences of the countless structures that we routinely pass by and occasionally enter.


My influences are many and extend into the early 20th century, including works by El Lissitzky, Moholy Nagy, and Stuart Davis. I am interested in how these and other more recent artists have registered their own contemporary moment and the unprecedented transformations of interior and exterior space.