Baker Overstreet (B. 1981)

Taking painting as an infrastructure for visual euphoria, Baker Overstreet’s Alibaster Plaster Caster dazzles with its technicolour efficiency. Evoking a 1980s video game or psychedelic machine with castors, cogs and conveyor belts, acid-hued geometric shapes assert their form and function, each a vital component in the tightly balanced arrangement. As weighty blocks of primary tones anchor the scene, lively stripes and motley dots refute gravity, giving Overstreet’s Futurist contraption a sense of sci-fi weightlessness. Its symmetry brings the focus to a robotic-looking eye at the centre that seems to return our gaze with mechanic authority, infusing the work further with the mystic aura of an anthropomorphic mask or idol. The quality of the paint underscores this primitivist folk-art element: for all its systematic form, the artist’s hand is clear in the brushwork, which offers by turns feathery translucency and thick opacity; tracing the artist’s layered compositional decisions, its playful irregularities of line, shape and hue lend Alibaster Plaster Caster a warmly human glow.