In the essay “A Lived In Utopia: The Paintings of Joa Baldinger,” written for an exhibition organized by Jill Brienza, Carter Ratcliff states “ Cultivating autonomy she pictures not only things but also the act of picturing. Luxuriating in the possibilities for meaning, she elaborates it, teases it, and submits to its inevitable ambiguity. It is not just that ‘red is red and, at the same, the color of a pair of running shoes.’ Ambiguous form is impossible to separate from ambiguous feeling.”

“As Baldinger says, her art puts everything “up for grabs.” As we watch, simple liking for a subject becomes obsessed adoration, which becomes irony and then sympathetic detachment and all of these at once, because why should feeling acknowledge any constraints on its intensity or its complexity? What makes Baldinger’s art utopian is not just her assertion of her freedom but her exercise of it —and the pleasure she takes in that exercise, a pleasure one senses in every trace of her touch.“

Painted with open ambiguity and questioning response - juxtaposing, morphing and combining abstraction and representation - there is something that brings back the real world by painting it. The paintings question whether the artificial and the natural may be so clearly distinguished.

Baldinger’s broad textured strokes, highly nuanced in their simplicity, play with density, luminosity and, most strikingly, color. Her panels conjure a painterly world derived from a variety of sources: film, photography as well as direct observations of the theater of daily life. Baldinger highlights the complexity of human existence, both the convoluted liaisons and the quotidian details that are inherent in being.

There is no underlying narrative as it is each one of us who is enveloped as a subject in the evolving story. As she has said “The things we see around us, and are drawn to (and that draw is crucial) are much a part of our consciousness.“