Art in Review - The New York Times

Kristin Baker’s paintings strike the eye with a harsh and dazzling newness. But the eye adjusts and eventually is bored, despite the surfeit of thought, skill and art-historical asides. These clever, ambitious mergers of Pop, Minimalism and Abstract Expressionism reframe painting in cataclysmic compositions that nonetheless feel overly prescribed and soulless. Each work explodes across the surface as across a billboard or movie screen, in insistent synthetic colors; acrylic, not oil; applied with trowels and squeegees, not paintbrushes, to PVC, not canvas. The surfaces seem collaged together from slick, paper-thin, alternately jagged and straight-edged shards of the stuff, like 21st-century stained-glass windows. But the colors are actually smoothed on wet, in shapes determined by quantities of tape, huge tangles of which are visible in the poster announcing the show. These pieces might be wildly Futurist versions of the resin paintings that the California artist Ron Davis was known fo

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• Laura Gao