Never one to do things by halves, John Baldessari’s new show at Marian Goodman gallery in London presents his vast sculptural installation Brain/Cloud (Two Views): with Palm Tree and Seascape. It’s a wall-mounted… well… brain-cloud, set off by two seascape prints and a time-delayed video which projects the viewer looking at the sculpture thirty seconds earlier. This is the first time the 2009 work has been shown since the artist’s major 2010 travelling retrospective Pure Beauty, and it wittily nods to Rene Magritte’s 1937 Not to Be Reproduced (Ha!). Baldessari has long looked to clouds and biology in his work: 1965’s God Nose presented a joyfully blue sky peppered with a small cloud and large, abstracted nose. Here the brain definitely becomes cloud-like; hinting, perhaps, at the metaphysical, unknowable essence of our thoughts.
