The Cosmic Art of Firelei Báez

Big paintings. Tiny drawings. Sculptural installations. There’s nothing that New York City artist Firelei Báez can’t and won’t attempt in a new exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

The VAG has invested in a major way in promoting the show: Báez is everywhere. Posters are splashed across town, and the north façade of the gallery features a massive pair of the artist’s images. As a first mid-career retrospective, it’s a big show, and there is no denying the unadulterated pleasure that comes cascading down like a tsunami from the artist’s large-scale works.

It’s fine to revel in beauty for its own sake, but there’s more to the paintings and drawings than super saturated colours that shimmer and quake. The bigger picture often unfolds in the smaller details.

Born in 1981 in Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic and currently based in New York, the diasporic experience of people from the Atlantic basin are layered into Báez’s work, as is the experience of growing up in a family of fierce women.

Báez’s earliest experiences in the generative capacity of art came from watching her older sister make magic with crayons. Although her sister ultimately decided to pursue a career in medicine, the younger Báez never lost her taste for creation.

It was not the easiest path. Her mother informed her that even if she couldn’t help her daughter in her chosen career, she would not stand in her way. After attending the Cooper Union school of art, Báez blazed a remarkable path into the art world, with exhibitions and awards aplenty, and a ferocious commitment to telling her own truth.

Beauty is enough

The convergence of the personal and political in making art is not a new approach, but the richness and fecundity of Báez’s work moves it into unexpected directions.

As she explained during the VAG’s media preview, she attended art school in a period when painting was considered somewhat uncool and old-fashioned. Báez had the courage of her convictions, namely that beauty is enough, more than enough.

The sheer bravura overload of her work, with paintings stretching across the gallery walls in epic expanse, is sufficient to overwhelm the senses.

Things get truly interesting in the smaller spaces. Patterns of cloth, tiny leg hairs, eyeballs, plants, flowers, as well as voluptuous hips and thighs figure largely throughout her work. It’s high femme stuff, but there’s an edge to it. The lusciousness of the images is often leavened with a good dose of grotesquery in the form of high-heeled feet, hairy limbs, and almost carnivorous looking foliage. It’s a jungle, teeming and lush, ripe with fruit, leaves and other forms of plant and orgiastic life.

There is a certain kind of seduction happening here, but the historical and cultural layers of meaning embedded in the work have a way of complicating matters.

Many drawings and paintings in the show are inscribed on top of sourced materials, old maps, remaindered books and outdated texts that speak to a version of the world that was once largely determined by colonialist forces.

History is never fixed

Báez has embedded all kinds of historical references, some more oblique than others, into her work. A Drexcyen chronocommons (To win the war you fought it sideways), is a case in point. Density, in the service of a larger experience, is part of it.

When one walks into the room that houses the installation, it feels as if there is an immediate drop in air pressure.

The work takes inspiration from historical horror when pregnant women were thrown overboard during the Middle Passage of the transatlantic slave trade.

In transforming this atrocity, Báez offers a world where women not only survived but their unborn children learned to breathe underwater and founded an entirely new world. The idea of Drexciya as an Afrofuturist society has manifested in a number of other artists and musicians’ work, but here it is actualized as a physical, inhabitable place.

In invoking this fantastical world, Báez employs ordinary materials. A series of blue tarps, like those used for emergency shelter, form an undulating ceiling. The blue expanse is poked through with holes so that spots of light shine through. The aquatic atmosphere is immediately apparent, but there are other things that demand a closer look, such as the twinned portraits that face each other across the gallery. Two goddesses or perhaps high priestesses, commanding, regal, crowned with magnificent tignons.

The head coverings worn by women of African descent occur frequently in Báez’s paintings, often with densely worked patterns that contain references to everything from the Black Panthers to symbols of resistance and faith. Black women were required to wear tignons as part of the sumptuary laws enacted in 1786 by then-governor Esteban Rodríguez Miró y Sabater.

While the law required women to wear them, the intent of the edict was entirely disrupted as women styled them to become larger, more elaborate and ultimately more alluring, influencing fashion even in distant Europe.

The lesson: history is never fixed. It’s as fluid as the conflagration of colour, form and texture that make up Báez’s work.

Amidst the lusciousness, an emotional distance

In other paintings, Báez makes use of her heritage and experience, infusing mythic creatures like ciguapa with a distinctly feminist lens. As she explains in a video interview, these creatures, with their backward facing feet and luxurious manes of hair who lured men to their fates, have been reimagined as sexy, independent entities and united by the artist’s impressive mastery of colour.

Many of the works incorporate the technique of poured paint, complete with puddled areas resplendent with a fringed, lacey edges. The combination of free-flowing technique with careful, painstaking attention to the details of figures, toenails, hair and vegetal growth creates beings that reverberate with the essence of life. They’re wildly compelling and a wee bit terrifying.

While Báez’s massive canvases are impressive, her smaller drawings and paintings are world-building in a different fashion — and fashion is the operative word, as many of the tiny figures, with their ample, fleshy bodies, are bursting with colour, pattern and style.

Man Without a Country is perhaps the most overt example of the artist’s fascination with overwriting older versions of history. Two hundred and twenty-five pages, sourced from deaccessioned books, are transformed with ink, blobs of colour, swatches of fabric and dancing figures, who kick out the jams of history.

Many of the decommissioned textbooks take as their subject the Island Hispaniola, now known as the Dominican Republic and Haiti. As the first landing place for European colonizers led by Christopher Columbus, the Island territory has suffered cataclysmic events over the centuries, from ethnic cleansing based along lines of colour to slave uprisings and revolutions.

The individual pages are arranged in a shape that suggests a large body of water, and there’s an easy fluidity to the flow and shape of the images. A dance of ideas that invites viewers to follow along or make their own way through the progression.

As much as Báez’s work is exquisitely rendered, there’s some distance that makes it hard to bridge. The emotional impact isn’t as great as I was expecting, but I’m not exactly sure why. The beauty is ample, overflowing and the depth of ideas equally rich, but there’s something that maintains a distance in the work. In looking at art, sometimes it’s your gut that tells you the truth of things, what it reacts to or doesn’t.

The artist’s technical prowess is not in question, nor the depth and complexity of her chosen subjects. In many of the works, there are no faces, only watchful, almost wary eyes. Maybe this is part of the remove. Call it a kind of self-possession, perhaps.

Even as you look at these massive cosmic women, they’re also looking back at you. What are they saying? I’m not certain, but I’d like to hear more.

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A retrospective of Firelei Báez’s work runs until March 16, 2025, at the Vancouver Art Gallery.