“Something that is part of my personality is seeing the world slightly askew. It’s a perceptual stance. The real world is absurd sometimes, so I don’t make a conscious attempt, but because I come at it in a certain way, it seems really strange.” – John Baldessari

Having attained renown as a painter, John Baldessari broadened his ever-growing artistic output in the early 2000s to source photography and film from the 1970s. Continuing in earnest his investigation of the subject and its portrayal in popular culture, his work straddles the boundaries between abstraction and figuration, between the minimal and the conceptual, but importantly retaining his tongue-in-cheek dynamic. The present lot from the Intersection Series maintains the essential pictorial language at the core of Baldessari’s practice—innuendo, allegory, juxtaposition, opposition, and happy coincidence. Suffused with the spirit of Pop, Person Playing Poker/Beach Scene amplifies the mundane with an apparent, straightforward aesthetic and appropriation of imagery.

As with the other works in the Intersection Series, the present lot is comprised of two dissimilar and unrelated images, which the artist combines to generate a third image at the site of intersection. He then imposes brightly saturated patches of color to delineate negative space in this layered section; in the present work, chartreuse outlines the figure’s tie, while fuchsia, saffron, and teal outline the waves as they crash ashore. The central area of overlap has undergone something of an identity crisis, at once belonging to the horizontal and vertical axes yet fully committed to neither. Baldessari’s brilliance in illuminating the contrast between familiar and banal scenes with colorful interventions, essentially thrusts the viewer into visual entropy, as we come to feel our perceptions of ordinary images may never be the same.