Featured Art by Byron Baker & Will Alexander: Tryptch – #1. Quantum Electrical Field.
Collaboration by its very nature feeds from a-priori symbiosis never claimed via decimal or reduction so that it perfectly seeds the transpersonal. Exchange takes on a charismatic rhythm via a fertile interior tenor. Organic connective enunciates itself as none other than contagion. Thus rhythm activates and the individuals seed themselves as interior relay runners.
This latter kinetic being none other than spontaneous psychic exercise which remains the case when I think of my effort with Byron Baker as we painted our triptych. It was as if we were facing an electron field magically exploding from the invisible. For us, it was an endemic realia that allowed us entry to a plane that broached brazen fertility. The colours, lines, darts, spirals, emitted themselves at such a spontaneous pace that we felt ourselves no longer powered by skill as individual property, or via isolate technique, never claiming by this aforesaid technique some mark of individual superiority. It was in this state of consciousness that instantaneous labour proceeded.
For us, this was an electrical state anterior to what quotidian example condones as realia. To repeat myself it was like entering an electron field and condensing consciousness at a state sans some prior constriction shaped by what I understand to be an academic visual code with its rational hatching and perfectly wrought shading. Our commanding more was none other than a-symmetrical swiftness, as we brewed as double anodyne volcanoes spewing synergy anterior to lineal share and proportion.
Art by Byron Baker & Will Alexander: Tryptch – #2. Primal Circulation.
Painting in tandem with Byron was a decidedly transpersonal exercise. By the time the Mantric Multiverse was engaged we were not unlike relay runners embarking upon the last third of the triptych known in old track and field terminology as the “gun lap.” The latter term refers to the last stage of the race when a pistol fired a single blank alerting the runners for the need for all out effort so as to victoriously cross the finish tape. The key term here being acceleration, acceleration beyond personal cognitive comprehension. Not unlike this level of acceleration ours was an incendiary journey into vapour, into the energy of openness. Its electrical subtext being constantly suffused itself with vehicular maturation as an astonishing telepathy transpired. We constantly inhabited Matta’s world of “surprise” never having a cognitive plan of where the next stroke would ignite. We constantly convened about our experience as leading towards neurological liberty, so mush so, that it prompts the realia of the late cosmologist Allan Sandage spoke of as ” bio-geo poetry” the latter condition existing over beyond the exhaustion of numbers. This being a state where photons erupt at such a scale they will never osmotically invade our Milky Way.
Of course, lineal calculation can never apply. Because the optical operates as the central graph of record according to Occidental scale and evaluates itself as non-appearance across these works. Perhaps, a partial analogy could be made to Tamayo’s use of Pre-Columbian imagery as another tenor of reasoning when he saw other than human visage. Other than the reasoning which ran from Rivera and Sequieros through Orozco and Anguiano. Across our triptych there were, perhaps traces subconsciously mined from Tamayo’s resistance to dominant muralist inclination, but closer to our understanding persisted the example of Matta and Miro concerned as they were with the assassination of the body as quotidian reference point via its static three-dimensional form. In our particular context the imaginary was system unto itself. So as aural painters we were magically inspired by sonic prestidigitation. As we painted music erupted via the aural grammar of Charles Tolliver, Sam Rivers, Bobby Bradford, and Jackie McLean. All had their say, not simply providing an electric environment for painting but provoking roving discussion not unlike Eric Dolphy’s chromatics. During the last painting of the triptych it was the left handed opening notes of Cecil Taylor’s Indent that seemed to mesmerize our painting motion. Taylor’s sonic voltage was not unlike the primeval silicates that appeared on our canvass. Our painter’s kinetic was en-veined by curiosity as insistence. Not only with determination, but by a psychic magma that can only be described as painterly mathematics. Each scrawl, each line, each dot was none other than what we felt was architecturally accurate. The equations were tempestuous. They were not unlike conveyance via an incendiary summons enunciated from the above, sans such summons from codified religious embranglement being in essence uncanny electrical magnification.
The latter magnification having significant resonance with the invisible velocity of a telepathic blizzard, this being a blizzard anterior to all formation. One could call this state energy arising from pre-birth being pulsation akin to charismatic fire suddenly erupting from darkness. Let me reiterate, that this triptych was, above all, subsumed by pulsation, they being phosphenic marks that illuminate the calliginous via coils of intelligence rational cognition fails to explain. They seem to enact the density of riddles. Because they hyphenate and reappear to themselves they seed no stationary field for pre-planned arrangement, for rational abutment. We know that the blind can discharge sight through a form of aural complexity, and this aural complexity seems parallel, in our view, to indigenous mechanics. The latter being mechanics at the depth of living complication, this being complication that understands both ruination and its dialectic of psychic acceleration, that expands beyond composed thought and its transmutation by means of magic, the latter in keeping with the writhing colours of the triptych which remain not unlike the beauty that evinces itself as feral mathematics. It must be remembered that as primordial energy remains anterior to the human mind it always casts its precision prior to the codification of written number as fixation. When igniting our dots and lines and spirals, it was due to our psychic submersion in this anterior state. Colour was none other than anterior explosion.
Art by Byron Baker & Will Alexander: Tryptch – #3. Mantric Multiverse.
Grouping together Quantum Electrical Field, Primal Circulation, and Mantric Multiverse, seems at this point, to visually clarify themselves at this point, to a portfolio of consciousness that seemed to accelerate from canvass to canvass until by the final consuming strokes of the Mantric Multiverse optical denouement had transmuted to a powerful aural field where we could begin by aurally processing electrons thereby defining for us a collective an interior language. Not utopian calliope as self-praise, but genuine awareness of cleansed internal respiration. Maybe this can be best put by departing and summoning details from each work which then agglutinate into exponential levels never consciously pondered. I am thinking of primeval eons, of suns that imply other suns, to such a degree that the Occidental idea of conclusion never rises or appears.
These paintings remain optical equations being part of our extended visual process that ignited from our prior project entitled The Codex Mirror that contained Baker’s adroit primeval figures accompanied by my aphoristic verbal narrative. Thus, all of our efforts have been defined by self-experiment, by a solarized inner dimension, being purview of the cosmos. We were not as rural citizen’s confined by consternation, dazed and isolate, confined by provincial camaraderie. Transpersonal respiration extended far beyond each individual base, it was predilection sans exterior modeling as confine. Not secular respiration, but non-binding exploration into mystery. At this fundamental level we remain open to transcription of a future that will continue to align itself with mystery, the latter being our universal constant. Again, mystery fomented all our efforts as a supreme exercise via a being.
The inaugural Quantum Electrical Field naturally extended into the middle creation Primal Circulation, which then mounted into the clarifying summons that is Mantric Multiverse. I mention these works again not as some repetitive addendum but only to underscore their momentum as figments of what the New Guineans understood to be as creative moisture from the cosmos.
At this time when the Occident is seeming to spiral into open dissolution we understand it to be only a figment within the ominous mathematics that prevail across the cosmos. As we painted it was not unlike putting Eric Dolphy’s chromatics into practice. Always taking chances with streaks, and lines, and dots, Always possessing an unerring sense of their placement. Curiously, there was very little discussion of painting as we instinctively proceeded. Maybe a word or two on Van Gogh, and Manet or Lam. Matta, Gorky and Soutine, or the aforementioned Tamayo would crop up from time to time. Certainly we were more naturally drawn to the kind of colour expressed by Derain and de Vlaminck, and the power of colour as psychological. At a point or two the drawings of the Englishman Hayter were discussed but not to any controlling degree. Certainly no mention stretched back to the likes of Orcagna and Masaccio. For our particular sensibility history functioned as stimulation rather than as restraint not unlike electrons in motions towards the unforeseen.
Certainly these are not works painted to attract a coterie of followers, but to stimulate psychic capacity over and beyond the lifeless state of forgone conclusion. Our painterly mazes ignite as arteries of crystal not unlike the Chilean Matta when he appended the word “surprise” to his works. Certainly this is the plane that Breton and the early surrealists inaugurated where it was understood that the model will be “internal” or not at all.
Byron Baker lives and works in Los Angeles. He paints many large and small scale oils on canvas. The majority, while still in storage, were destroyed by vandals in the early 1990s, an event he overcame with darkly placed humor. Prior to this he participated in exhibitions in Los Angeles including Remove Your Hat and Two-Headed Collage both in 1984, Harvest of Evil in Columbus, Ohio, 1983, Optic Occultation/Visible Invisibility group show in Los Angeles, 2015, and Searings solo show at Oeno Vino Gallery in Atwater, California 2016. His work is included in the anthology Invisible Heads: Surrealists in North America – An Untold Story ( Anon Edition 2011), Jhim Pattison’s posthumous collection In The Arms of the Honey Eaters (Anon Edition 2013), Searings: Works on paper by Byron Baker (Anon Edition 2013), The Codex Mirror by Byron Baker and Will Alexander (Anon Edition 2015), C. Brooke Rothwell’s The Attic (Rothwell’s Round-Up 2015), Spectra 2. At the Edge of the Forest (2016), Spectra 3. In the House of Blue Daggers (2018), Allan Graubard’s A Crescent By Any Other Name (Anon Edition 2017), Ce Qui Sera/What Will Be – Almanac of the International Surrealist Movement (Brumes Blondes 2014), L’Epreuve perilleuse by La Vertebre et le Rossignol 4 – (2016), and Vies de Saint-Artaud by La Vertebrate et le Rossignol (2018). He is a founding member of the Industrial Music Group Mal Occhio expressing a passion that continues to this day. Presently Byron Baker is curator of the Oeno Vino Gallery located in The Wine Cellar of Oeno Vino Wines located in Atwater, California, where he has curated exhibitions of marvelous photography, collage and painting.
