15/9 – 27/10 2018
Pentimenti Gallery | Philadelphia | Pensilvania
The exihibition presents a concentrated view of Steven Baris’s painting practice, centered on his sustained investigation of constructed space, spatial ambiguity and perceptual structure. The exhibition brings together a group of paintings that operate through shifts in plane, rhythm and color, evoking a visual language that alludes to montage and abrupt transitions rather than linear narration. The title suggests a conceptual parallel with cinematic editing, where meaning is generated through discontinuity, juxtaposition and spatial compression.
Baris’s work explores the geometry of contemporary built environments—industrial zones, infrastructural spaces, transit architectures and peripheral landscapes—translating these references into an abstract pictorial vocabulary. His paintings do not depict specific places, but instead construct spatial systems that hover between recognition and disorientation. Interlocking planes, calibrated color fields and architectural fragments create environments that feel simultaneously ordered and unstable, inviting the viewer to navigate spaces that resist fixed orientation.
The paintings in Jump Cut emphasize surface and structure as active agents of perception. Layers of oil paint articulate depth through overlap and tension rather than illusionistic perspective, while sharp edges and transitional zones guide the eye across the canvas. These works suggest spaces in flux, shaped by movement and interruption, where visual continuity is constantly challenged.
Steven Baris develops his practice from a long-standing interest in how contemporary environments shape visual cognition and bodily experience. Raised across different regions of the United States, including American Indian reservations in northern California, Montana and Washington State, his early exposure to varied landscapes contributes to his sensitivity toward spatial transition and displacement. He earns a Bachelor of Arts from The Evergreen State College and a Master of Fine Arts from the Tyler School of Art, where his engagement with abstraction deepens into a structured yet open-ended inquiry.
His work is exhibited internationally in galleries and institutions across the United States and Europe, and is included in public and private collections. Throughout his career, Baris consistently approaches abstraction not as a purely formal exercise, but as a means to reflect on systems of organization, circulation and perception embedded in contemporary space. Jump Cut articulates this investigation with clarity and restraint, offering a body of work that situates abstraction as a critical lens through which to reconsider how we inhabit, traverse and mentally construct the environments around us.