About

In Bailin's hands the mark of charcoal expresses directness and dynamism, both as the artist makes the mark and as the viewer reads it. As the story unfolds in the artist's studio, marks and forms are placed and erased and placed again, sometimes so much that a hue emerges from the residue of medium, which itself lends meaning to the scene. Tracee Robertson

From his early Holocaust drawings, in which he superimposed symbols of the Kabbalah over scenes of outrage, to his series of Biblical scenes set in the midcentury, to today's erasings, works that reference the loss of memory and personality, Bailin's narratives offer us a way to think about the human condition. We can be cruel, we can be banal, and eventually we aren't anymore. Leslie Peacock

Drawn in charcoal (and coffee!) on large sheets of paper, Bailin’s rough-hewn but beautifully detailed pictures present us with men in crisis–that is, men who seem to have grasped that their crises have overcome them and require resistance or escape. Peter Frank

In his efforts to accrete images from constituent parts, Bailin adopts a multiplicity of implements, yielding various textures and marks. His works skirt the edge of abstraction and approach drawing as text, and as theater, rich in surface and movement. Christopher Michno

Bailin's drawings…remain complex and not easily deciphered…the new context he provides for these psychologically-charged fragments, […] reflects one of the major problems of modern life—the anxieties that arise from the stream of highly-charged emotional situations that arise daily, the desire for the simple life, and the complexity of the questions that arise when one is finally alone. Ruth Pasquine

Bailin approaches each blank page as if a theatrical space to be occupied, activated. Each sheet becomes the site of a performance—Bailin’s own gestural charcoal dance and his character’s parallel search for a place, a form, a moment of reprieve. Leah Ollman