Painting gets most exciting when an artist relieves it of its historic burden of pretending to be a stable or consistent communicative vehicle. Joe Baldwin’s canvases have a kind of pictorial equanimity and a casual, cursory air that never obscures the sense that they are intelligent and pertinent. Within these ten works he essays realism, pattern painting, hard-edged abstraction, painterly abstraction, rectangular and shaped canvases—declaring a reserved pluralism. His oeuvre takes sustenance from its intrinsic variety, the amiable and slightly seditious “on-the-otherhand- ness” that kicks