Jimmy Baker

In Jimmy Baker’s highly romanticized future, men resemble rock stars and women (mostly) blue-eyed naïfs. Though dichotomies, not to mention gender stereotypes, abound, Baker’s startling paintings and ambitiously imagined dystopic future—where everyone looks somewhat like an android and either totes a shotgun or shields an iPod that blooms from the belly—are compelling. “Rapture” includes eight portraits, four of men set against dark backgrounds and four of women set against white, each rendered in a lush, hyperreal style. The Rembrandt-inspired images are smothered in thick coat of resin that are meticulously etched with iconic imagery and letters. Clear-eyed subjects gaze through strata of toxins, their skin glowing like new plastic dolls and hair falling in softly rendered dreadlocks or pixie cuts. Along with the paintings are several works in a variety of media. The most intriguing of these is a pair of doors from the model of car used by many American contractors in Iraq, positioned as if opened out from the absent vehicle. Others, notably an appropriated video of Saddam Hussein’s execution played on a cell phone in a black room, are too loaded to function as an addendum to an already packed exhibition. If aspects of “Rapture” feel misguided, they are trumped by Baker’s sincerity and invention.