Big Pan

In Michael Bauer's paintings tendrils ascend, wilt and dissolve in a sepia gloom; occasionally they float, enmeshed in eyeballs or ribbons of bright, rich color that rises from the wreckage of a tough geometry. These are images partly built from non-sequiturs, flamboyant shards of bodies, and spiky, fabricated animals-they're fragmented, sexual, feverish and funny; worlds within worlds that wont be pinned down. They make me think of filthy cities, and filthier minds; of lavish interiors, abandoned excavations, half-remembered rituals, snatches of music and inexplicable joy. The paint breathes and spawns like mud, and, like mud, it encourages growth-of words or unexpected detours into humor or allusions to a mythology of lost codes. But there is also something of the bird about these pictures, in their beaky protrusions, feathery, jewel-like flashes of color and light, flights of fancy As much as modernity has attempted to argue for reason and linearity, perceptionand, by association, most peoples relationship to sighthas never discarded its innate state of disarray (we see what we want to see, despite evidence to the contrary, and the translate it accordingly). Nothing can ever be truly whole, complete or resolved when we live in an infinite state of fluxhow could it be, when everything will change in the blink of an eye? (J. Higgie (ed.), Michael Bauer: Borwasser, Zurich, 2009, n.p.)