Los Angeles Times
By Leah Ollman
Jan 18 08
Dan Bayles' paintings of the new U.S. Embassy buildings in Baghdad have something in common with other aspects of our engagement in Iraq: The designs are compelling on paper but far from tenable on the ground. Perfectly acceptable for art, not such a good idea in politics.
Bayles, a recent MFA grad from UC Irvine, paints the structures of the 104-acre compound (whose completion continues to be delayed) as "New Ruins." The buildings are on their way up and on their way down at once. They are simultaneously becoming and eroding.
Bayles has a marvelously adept manner of evoking this dual state of generation and decay. He builds each image out of different modes of representation -- schematic, realistic, photographic -- and creates a sense of space that is convincing and yet uncertain. Painted fragments of walls abut structures risen from photographs of weathered wood or distressed stone that are cut into small tiles and collaged onto the surface to look like brickwork. Painted patches of green scattered about the grounds of the pool house and other structures read as landscaping but have the fluttery indeterminacy of torn-paper collage.
Surface textures throughout are discontinuous. What appear to be strips of tape crisscross the canvases and are painted over, adding to the feeling of a provisional materiality, equal parts intention and debris.
What Bayles has done in this engrossing series is visualize the architecture of entropy.