In his artist statement on his Intersection Series, John Baldessari describes “different worlds colliding, where the essence of one is comingled/contaminated/merged with the other, especially at the point of juncture” (John Baldessari quoted in: Patrick Pardo and Robert Dean, John Baldessari: Catalogue Raisonné Volume Four: 1994-2004, New Haven 2017, p. 406). His view was on the evolving facades and fashions of Los Angeles between 2001-13, combining painting and photography in a towering response to the contemporary cityscape. Intersection Series: Automobile / High Rise Building encapsulates Baldessari’s unwavering instinct for visual impact and his distinctive approach to constructing meaning from visual apparatus; an idiosyncratic mix of the photographic, filmic and painted image that lies at the heart of Baldessari’s conceptual practice.

Intersection Series: Automobile / High Rise Building slides a grey-scale film still of a speeding car over vertical colour photograph of a high-rise building, where the images overlap intersecting forms are blocked out in bright, pop-ish hues of acrylic paint. The building is one of the luxury condos and apartment blocks lining the Wilshire corridor in West Los Angeles; Baldessari explained “such buildings make me uneasy wherever they are, Central Park West in NYC, or any place in the world. Maybe it’s because I was raised in a low-income city …. such buildings symbolize a life I don’t want and that nullifies life” (John Baldessari quoted in: Ibid.). He describes combining a photograph of the Wilshire corridor with one from a film set: “an urge fulfilled! I like changing their stupefying sameness” (John Baldessari quoted in: Ibid.). This playful disruption of imagery is inherent in the present work, alongside the artist’s penchant for visual puns: the repetition of the film still’s speeding car with its contemporary mirror on the Wilshire corridor below, and the arrangement of the photographs themselves, the opposing axes reflecting the vertical and horizontal nature of urban space or even an aerial view of the street.
Intersection Series: Automobile / High Rise Building joins an expansive survey of cities and urban space that stretches across Baldessari’s oeuvre. It was executed between the Overlap and Junction series in early 2000s, and notably echoes National City from the late 1960s; “I would drive around National City where I was living and randomly shoot out of the window with the camera without even looking and drive with the other hand” (John Baldessari quoted in: Moira Roth, ‘Interview with John Baldessari (1973)’, X-TRA, Winter 2005, Vol. 8, No. 2, online). A similar approach to photography is combined with the artist’s method of obscuring areas of the print in vividly coloured paint, a collision of photography and painting that reverberates throughout his practice. Baldessari closes his rationale for the Intersection series with this in mind, “lastly, such subject matter provides me with a reason to pursue two loves, painting and photography. But really one love – art” (John Baldessari quoted in: Ibid.).
