Color Surge.(Kristin Baker)(Interview)

Byline: Dodie Kazanjian reports. Photographed by Norman Jean Roy.

How do you paint the modern world? Kristin Baker's riotous abstracts on PVC are inspired by both art history and Nascar racing.

Every once in a great while, a young artist comes out of the starting gate so fast that shock waves radiate in several directions. Kristin Baker is one of these. A month after she got her M.F.A. from Yale's School of Art in the spring of 2002, her large-scale, fiercely colorful paintings, whose volcanic energy evoked, in abstract terms, the excitement and danger of Formula One car racing, appeared in a group show at P.S.1 in Long Island City and blew whatever art happened to be nearby to smithereens. Jeffrey Deitch, whose Deitch Projects gallery is a Mecca for new talent, had already agreed to represent her by then. In 2004, the Centre Pompidou in Paris gave her a solo show, and not long afterward big-time collectors Charles Saatchi, Francois Pinault, and Steven Cohen started buying her work. "She's one of the most convincing abstract painters of her generation," says Alison Gingeras, the former Pompidou curator who is now the chief curator of the Francois Pinault Collection, "and she's just at the beginning of her arc of experimentation and of finding her voice."

This sounds like heavy baggage for the 33-year-old, blonde, soft-voiced, and rather shy person I meet when I visit her studio in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. The studio is immense--72 feet long by 48 feet wide by 20 feet high. Four new paintings are in the works here. The largest, a 30-foot sweep of atmospheric orange and yellow forms, dominates the entire wall in back; it is loosely based on Tintoretto's Crucifixion in the Scuola di San Rocco in Venice, one of the greatest masterpieces of the High Renaissance. In spite of her shyness and obvious reticence to talk about a work in progress, Kristin is clearly comfortable with big ideas and big pictures. "I love painting large," she tells me. "It's just a lot more fun to conquer. I want the paintings to create an environment that envelops you."

The studio is Kristin's world. Her obsessive need for order is reflected in the color charts on the wall, which document the hundreds of acrylic colors she mixes herself and keeps in identical plastic deli containers (she buys them wholesale), on wheeled metal trolleys. Her originality shows up in the materials she works with--metal spatulas in many sizes (the largest is three feet wide) instead of paintbrushes; rolls and rolls of blue masking tape that she uses to get the collage-like effects of her compositions (two mounds of discarded tape are steadily growing on the floor); plastic PVC panels instead of canvas. Bright colors are everywhere. The risers on the steps leading up to her platform office are painted alternately red and yellow. The file cabinet and the Haier mini-icebox are fire-engine red. Pink and orange plastic buckets hold kitchen utensils, paper napkins, and ready-made servings of coffee for her high-tech Le Cube espresso machine. Kristin herself, who almost never wears color, has on a long black wrap sweater by Comme des Garcons, with jeans and brown Yves Saint Laurent boots. She's very pretty, but her manner is low-key, quietly humorous, and somewhat self-effacing.

The three other unfinished paintings in the studio are smaller than the big one but still monumental. The abstract images in one of them remind me of her earlier race-car pictures. "Yeah, that's a Nascar crash," she says, "or it's coming from that." In the paintings she showed at Deitch Projects last spring, Kristin had moved away from the racetrack theme, with its explosive planes of color and car fragments hurtling outward from the center. Her new work channeled some of art history's famous evocations of natural or man-made disasters: Gericault's Raft of the Medusa, Delacroix's Death of Sardanapalus. Her Gericault-inspired piece, which she called The Raft of Perseus, is the least abstract of her "history paintings." It shows the raft and the sea, but with all the people removed. Painting it made her feel "hokey" at the time. "Was I just drawing from the general energy of it, or was I interested in redepicting it for our time? I'm still going back and forth with this one. After finishing that, I wanted to run far away from it and go right back into abstraction." What she's really doing now is trying to absorb art history and transform it into a contemporary idiom.

"If I look at trends in contemporary art," she says, "I don't feel within them at all. The big trend right now is about being unambitious and unmonumental, like the opening show at the New Museum, this unfabricated assemblage kind of thing. I'm definitely not a part of that. My stuff is very technical and very ambitious."