Donald Baechler: XL + XS

With the collage sensibility of Robert Rauschenberg and the colorful brashness of Cy Twombly, American painter Donald Baechler (born 1956) makes works of invigorating vitality, positing boldly symbolic shapes (flowers, skulls, globes), rendered in cartoon-thick black outlines, onto collaged or painted backgrounds, or else confronting marbled, tea-stained grounds with heavy black silhouettes, potato-print style, of plants, rough human forms and other evocative formations. Baechler's newest volume here presents 200 color reproductions of his recent works: seven gargantuan canvases (XL) and hundreds of modestly-scaled drawings (XS), no larger than a legal pad of paper. These could be described as postmodern cave drawings: "I tend to be interested," the artist has said, "in things I find on the street or things drawn on toilet walls or things drawn by someone I meet in a bar, who maybe has never made a drawing since he was five years old."