That sort of painting, much like the venerable axeman's riff, has gone "out of mode," as Bavington recently observed on KNPR's State of Nevada. But in painting as in pop music, all that is old shall be new, color field is in again, and Bavington's stripe revival has won admirers across the country. His show at a New York gallery last year caught the eye of a Museum of Modern Art curator, and MoMA eventually acquired Bavington's painting "Physical S.E.X.," which was inspired by a song by the band Darkness.
Reviewing a Bavington show six years ago at Mark Moore Gallery in Los Angeles for Art Issues, David Pagel wrote: "In a sense, Bavington does for stripe painting what Playboy did for pornography. Preferring the suggestiveness of the airbrush to the explicitness of the starkly depicted close-up, his soft rendition of hard-edged abstraction leaves room for the imagination."
The inviting fuzziness that excited Pagel, and me, is evident in the one painting displayed in Bavington's solo show at G-C Arts—the former Godt-Cleary Project's first official offering under its new name and ownership. "Sympathy for the Devil," Bavington told KNPR, is somewhat like the painting MoMA bought, a 6-foot-tall band of stripes, in tones at once alluring and caustic, flanked by panels of flat black. He also said he does not expect viewers to find direct analogy—that a painting "doesn't look like sound"—and at first glance the Stones' dark samba does not reveal itself. But it's not overreaching to perceive an echo of Keith Richards' piercing solo in those shimmering strings of acid green and steely lilac.
The balance of Tim Bavington: Drawings 2002-2006," as the title indicates, comprises works on paper. And most of these are labeled "digital monoprints," meaning unique, high-quality prints from Bavington's latest "sketching tool," a computer. In these works, ruled lines run under the blocks of stripes, keeping time, and gradient squares correlate chords and colors. If the "post-painterly" objective is the utter absence of human agency in the precise presentation of form and hue, Bavington's computer has accomplished it at last. These prints are not unattractive, just as coldly clinical as the test page a color printer emits after you change an ink cartridge.
Bavington drew several similar studies in color pencil on graph paper, and here, even this rigorous drafting context cannot reduce, much less eliminate, evidence of the hand at work. "Hey Joe (Double Diamond)," with two guitar lines arranged in stacked parallelograms, evokes Hendrix-like cascades. Works such as "Undone" and "Buddy Holly" are closer yet in spirit to paintings, their rugged, variegated lines of grainy pastel resonant against irregular blocks of black Sumi ink.
What distinguishes Bavington's work in general from that of his color-field forebears is their conceptualist stance, which layers ironies over the earlier goal of pure formalism. In his KNPR interview, Bavington outlined a sequence of polarities—rock songs are pop, abstraction is "high" art, the spray gun pop again. From this we can infer other tensions. Austere art drains the guitar riff of its brio. The computer clears away the hand that holds the mouse. The inescapably linear time of listening threads through the timeless, here-and-there manner of seeing. (Next year, Bavington's painting will grace an installation at MoMA devoted to the theme of time.)
Seen as studies for paintings, Bavington's digital prints are useful and at times appealing glimpses into his methods. But just as we watch the guitarist's fingerwork during the solo, we seek the hand, even in the most rigorously formal art.