JLG Projects: Claudia Doring Baez: Trace

JLG Projects presents Claudia Doring Baez: Trace. Inspired by the stark intimacy of Peter Hujar’s photography, Doring Baez reimagines his black-and-white portraits into luminous painted bodies. Working with sweeping gestures of vibrant oil paint and oil stick, her work becomes a symbolic act of revival as well as a critical inquiry into collective memory. There is a vitality to the work, an envisioned physical presence that advances through the layers of paint. In tracing the past, Doring Baez’s exploration in Hujar’s works examines authorship, identity and the way in which meaning condenses, alters, and dissolves when recast anew. As Susan Sontag famously observed, photography is inherently linked to death, it freezes a moment in time. Doring Baez’s paintings, however, bring these vulnerable moments to life, shifting stillness into a sensorial presence that is all at once timeless yet nostalgic.