Yevgeniya Baras at the Landing

In “I Sit by the Window” at the Landing Gallery, Yevgeniya Baras has presented dozens of new paintings. Each one is a sculptural puzzle. Built up on burlap fabric, the artist embeds rope, paper pulp, wood, and other mixed material to create idiosyncratic and textural surfaces that she then layers on top of with gloopy paint. Inspired by recent time spent in Texas, Baras uses a colorful yet muted color palette across the exhibition. Bright ochres melt into muddy browns and pock-marked blues. Built-up dimensional ridges create organic forms across that canvas that dually read as aerial landscapes or microscopic bodily organisms.

Many of the untitled paintings contain letterforms that stack onomatopoeically across the canvas, integrating with abstract geometries though never culminating in any readable words. These clues prompt you to search for more legibility in each work — either textual or narrative. And while the artist references specific experiences in each work, she coyly withholds that clarity from the viewer. The work instead revels in a middle ground between knowable forms and abstraction, always pushing you to search its layered depths for more.