At Studios Inc., Robert Bingaman’s pools run deep

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What happens when an artist traces a chosen symbol, subject or idea to its limits? What happens when the artist brings us with him over that journey’s full trajectory?

I wondered these things after looking at what may be the last of Robert Bingaman’s stunning nighttime swimming pools. His exhibition at Studios Inc., titled Until It’s All You See, sets up a directive and then meets it. The show, which wraps up this week (it’s good to call ahead), marks the culmination of his three-year residency there, and the four paintings on display — especially the three monumental images called “Pool 15,” “Pool 16” and “Pool 17” — leave absolutely nothing to be desired. So one answer to “what happens when” is that the artist perhaps moves on to other symbols, subjects or ideas.

Bingaman’s work is well-documented on his website, which includes a gallery of 15 pool paintings, all of them equally fascinating. They resemble the cool-colored shapes you see punctuating certain neighborhoods on the voyeuristic Google Earth, interrupting the land with their beckoning aquatic density.

The show’s title tells us that these latest works are meant to be absorbed in person. It’s not “until you see nothing else” or “until that’s all to see” — rather, we are given a decoder and permission to immerse our vision as completely as possible. This is as close as some of us will ever get to swimming without getting wet. This is as close as some of us will get to a certain kind of luxury, a certain totem of aspirational suburban prosperity. Here we imagine sitting quietly beside a shimmering form that we own, a body of water we have tamed.

These four works show Bingaman shifting his perspective a little from earlier pool paintings, the first of which he conceived more than a decade ago during what he has said was a rough patch as he worked toward his Master of Fine Arts degree. These most recent pools are lower and closer to us, wider than your reach. “Pool 14,” the first that you see at Studios, is hung alone on a movable wall facing the gallery entrance. It’s small, relative to the other images here, but it’s still an impressive 6 feet by 4 feet, its parallelogram of “water” narrow and generally atypical of the average in-ground pool. It asks for close inspection — or, anyway, that you avoid looking at its nearby looming siblings just yet. When it is, as directed, all that you see, you appreciate the delicate building of colors and subtle edging and details, which elevate it from the mere outline you take in at first glance.

Like a greedy kid at a water park, you might be tempted to bounce from pool to pool, the better (you imagine) to figure out contrasts (how the paintings speak to one another) before deliberately settling into each image in turn (how each separate pool is speaking to you). But each of the four paintings here requires many breaths to take in.

“Pool 15” is dusky, and the yellow of “Pool 16” is perplexing and maybe a bit toxic — signals that Bingaman has set aside the more literal elements of his swimming-pool metaphor. It’s not important to justify a narrative for what may be a stormy sky overhead or for colored lights underwater or for some kind of neglect that has led to an algae bloom. Keep looking and you find Bingaman’s mastery of fixing form within a visual — and narrative — void. A shape, full of washes applied broadly, has been allowed to drip and create texture, alluding to water without abandoning the sentiment of being paint.

For context, look at “Court,” on the artist’s website, which bears a similar watery texture applied to the surface of a private tennis court. Here, and with his paintings in general, Bingaman leaves people out, lets us visit his terrains alone. He doesn’t provide the realistic kind of background that would appear in another kind of rendition of a swimming pool at night. The edges are absolute, and the forms run off the canvas.

“Pool 17” serves as a culmination within a culmination. It is, like two others at Studios, huge at 12-plus feet by 9-plus feet. But its placement, alone at the far end of the space, allows for the fullest play of proximities. You see it from afar as a 12-sided (at least) form, calling you into the distance, as meandering as a river with straight-edged banks. Come closer, and it starts to show its depth, until you feel somehow inside it. Until it becomes all you see.

A gallery essay by Lucas Wetzel, blocked as a parallelogram onto card stock that you can carry away (or read online), provides insights into Bingaman’s “until it’s all you see” process and the challenges he has attempted to address with these pools. On Bingaman’s website, there’s also a more formal essay by Wetzel that gives his take on the work, having visited the artist’s studio several times to observe him working. Both are helpful, though neither should interrupt you as you bathe in these overwhelming works.

The shapes and color combinations that Bingaman could factor into more of these paintings seem endless, even as Until It’s All You See captures an idea at its pinnacle. See these paintings and you may find yourself wanting a Bingaman pool on your wall more than you want the real thing dug into your yard.