“This show is about how the past is still the present,” the artist says of her 2019 series of paintings, entitled “Outside It,” remarking on how the Luxembourg Gardens look the same today as they did in Brassaï’s Paris of the 1930s and 40s. Or, on a darker note, how the nuances of sexual transactions remain timeless, as instantly recognizable then as they are now. …Doring-Baez brings a new dimension to Brassaï's black-and-white images by depicting them in a subtly colored palette…Doring-Baez’s work is a brilliant feat of channeling. She doesn’t appropriate so much as mediate another artist’s imagery, bringing to it her own unconscious, with its Proustian layers of memories. “It is so much more fascinating to work from someone else’s mind. You’re figuring out who was Brassaï, and who are these people. It gives you a double layer. It is like figuring out a big puzzle,” she says. “And I can make up the colors. There is a moment when I am thinking, ‘Oh my God, what is the color of the night sky in Paris?’ So it’s challenging.”….As is the subject matter itself. “Brassaï’s photographs are of human nature in all its glory and all its decadence,” says the artist. The same could be said of Doring-Baez’s Brassaï-inspired paintings.
-Excerpts from an interview and essay by author Phoebe Hoban
