Starkly whimsical, moody and cartoon-like, Hilary Baker’s paintings are set amidst static, nearly depthless landscapes, and are reminiscent of a dream from which one cannot wake. Via the repetition of a curious mingling of mutable and distinctive imagery – eyeballs stacked upon eyeballs, cartoonish spiders, and clouds dripping blood amongst lonely, moonlit ziggurats, watchtowers, and silos – Baker’s paintings suggest a serialized, surrealist narrative. The paintings present themselves as scenes from a story we can’t quite remember, from some bygone world or abandoned future. Baker’s work echoes that sublime mixture of joy and terror inherent in the experience of duende. Duende, from Andalusian folklore and as embraced by the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, refers to both mischievous demon-like characters and “a mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher can explain.”