The work of Firelei Báez, the subject of a first-ever museum survey opening at the ICA this week, is so rich with meaning, and so articulately painterly, that writing about it is a dilemma: Do I skim through the 38 works here, squeezing as many as I can into this space? Or do I do what comes naturally and fall into the depths of just a few, the better to share the rewards of knowing them — and Báez — that much more?
In case you missed it, it’s an easy choice. Báez is one of the most captivating, eloquent, thoughtful, and materially gifted painters working today; the exhibition, curated with elegant clarity by Eva Respini, leaves no doubt of that. Spanning two decades of work, it is, to borrow a phrase, like a window pane, with simple white walls and intuitive, generously spaced groupings that nonetheless feel intimate, united by common cause.
Cause is a unifying trope: Báez, born in 1981, works almost as a medium, conjuring cultural memory and lost narratives to inflect the narrow strictures of official history. She begins her work with deep historical research, pushing past the conventional, the known. That amassed knowledge takes shape in humane, extravagantly beautiful work, most often paintings, that feel equal parts elegiac and aspirational; they mourn what was lost, and embrace the good that may yet come from finally being known.
Leading a tour of the show this week, Báez paused in front of “the trace, whether we are attending to it or not (a space for each other’s breathing),” 2019. The piece grew from her research on the Louisiana Purchase and Caribbean ties to New Orleans, Westward Expansion, and The Great Migration. In the midst of a long, eloquent speech coaxing speculative futures from a hidden past, she stopped herself. “I can go into tunnels of information,” she said, with a laugh.
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Growing up in the Dominican Republic, her concerns stem from the complexities of the Atlantic world and its narratives of conquest, dominance, and subjugation; women, and their critical role in ensuring the survival of marginalized peoples, play a key part. She bridges gaps between official accounts and popular histories, folklore, and lives real and imagined, lost or buried as the conquerors subsumed all. For all the violation and trauma, her work has an unmistakably triumphant air; in those traumas she finds beauty and hope, and almost always the promise of renewal.
“Untitled (Les tables de geographie reduites en un jeu de cartes),” 2022
I love that Báez calls this piece — so full of narrative, history, and emotion that it’s all but literally exploding — “Untitled,” and then surrenders to the impossibility of it. With its spectacular bursts of orange, pink, lavender, and deep blue swiped and spattered in thick maelstroms of energy, she’s grappling with the legacies of gestural abstraction — mid-century, American, and very male — and calling out its dubious claims of formal purity.
Báez is fluent in art history, recent or otherwise; she can speak that language — think Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell — just fine. But she also animates it with poetic gravitas and rich narrative history.
Here, images of horses gallop and charge amid the murky, vibrant chaos; they all but obscure antique type, enveloped in the haze. As in so much of Báez’s work, an alluring surface first masks and then reveals astonishing depth. The text is from a 17th-century card game dedicated to the Grand Dauphin of France, the son of King Louis IV. Players competed for various colonial territories — Africa, the Americas, Asia — in a game of conquest. Báez’s work is, to my mind, joyful rebellion — a rejection of conquest by unbridled creatures running wild across its systems of control.
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Báez made the piece during a residency at the American Academy in Rome, a city lousy with statues of conquering heroes on horseback. Repurposing abstraction, which made a show of abandoning narrative and history, gives it even deeper resonance. There is no escape from the past, it seems to say; only strategies to meet it for what it is and craft a better future.
“A Drexcyen chronocommons (To win the war you fought it sideways),” 2019
The myth of Drexciya, the underwater kingdom built by enslaved people condemned to the waves during the Middle Passage, is relatively new as mythologies go. A fantasy crafted and nurtured by a Detroit electronic music duo of the same name in the 1990s, its allegorical power has been taken up by countless artists since. But its implications, of a Black utopia out of reach of the surface world’s cruelties and abuses, feels utterly timeless.
It’s an allegory of resilience amid unspeakable horror. Slave traders frequently threw their human cargo overboard, whether for illness, insolence, or simply insurance. Pregnant women were often the target; Drexciya is at least partly predicated on the fabulation that its founders are those children, born underwater amid the trauma of their mothers’ drowning, and adapted to survive.
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Generations later, what might Drexciya look like, and who might its people be? Báez’s vision here takes shape in a shadowy space of fluttering blue fabric, light dappling the floor through rips in the cloth like the rippling of waves above. It’s a gentle, restorative space, a haven, and at the same time personal; as a child in the Dominican Republic, she remembers a common blue tarp being pulled over makeshift shelters as hurricanes approached.
Two lush portraits appear here, layered with meaning and radiating serenity: one, of the exiled Haitian Queen Marie-Louise Coidavid; and the other, of her two daughters. Marie-Louise had become queen after the Haitian Revolution. Henry, her husband, was declared king in 1810. In 1820, Henry was overthrown, and Marie-Louise and her daughters escaped to Europe, where they remained in exile for decades. In the portraits, the women’s eyes, delicately articulated by Báez’s brush, carry a penetrating gaze; they’re placid, but stalwart. This is their place, they seem to say.
Drexciya, in Báez’s telling, posits an alternative to conquest, aggression, insurrection. Significantly, she imagines it as a feminine space — an exile that’s also a refuge, where loss and hope entwine.
“Untitled (Temple of Time),” 2020
An explosion of color in thick bands of paint radiates in a star-like burst; it’s like a pressure valve being released, the irrepressible set loose.
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In Báez’s constant spelunking through veiled histories, the piece feels emblematic. Underneath the eruption is a Parthenon-like building with fluted columns, a stolid symbol of classical learning; it’s a sketch from 1846 by the American educator and women’s rights activist Emma Willard who, like Báez, explored history with a critical eye to its exclusions.
But Willard had her shortcomings. Her recasting of history was unconventional, but exclusive all the same; her diagram maps history in three dimensions on the walls and columns of the building, but elides anything outside the classical western canon. Peer through the heavy paint and you can see familiar names: Ferdinand & Isabella, Voltaire, Henry IV.
Báez’s intervention is rough but jubilant, the lid blown off convention. It embodies her world view: of a culture still too in line with the strictures of conquest, ripe for revision, intervention, and liberation.
FIRELEI BÁEZ
Through Sept. 2. Institute of Contemporary Art, 25 Harbor Shore Drive. 617-478-3100, www.icaboston.org
Murray Whyte can be reached at murray.whyte@globe.com. Follow him @TheMurrayWhyte.