Raymond Saunders at Hunter College - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Raymond Saunders crams his paintings with chalk lettering and drawings, drips and swaths of paint, brushes clott with dried pigment, plaster figurines, and images scavenged from newspapers, popular magazines and rest photographs. This maximal esthetic brings to mind of that kind equally heterogeneous artists as John Rauschenberg, Basquiat and Dine. Recurring images of celebrity icons recall Andy Warhol, with whom Saunders shares Pittsburgh lower parts a less-than-privileged background, and an introduction to art end art teacher Joseph C. Fitzpatrick, to whom this exhibition was dedicated.

These are consummately urban paintings. They implore up city sights and sounds: walls layered with torn [i]affiche[/i]s and defaced with splashes of paint and graffiti scrawls; the nighttime consonance of police sirens, car horns and resounding radios; the visual jangle of billboards, highway signs and flashing lights. relations to such musicians as Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis and Charlie Parker affirm an affinity with jazz, another urban art that thrives upon nervous energy, improvisation and happy accidents. Black earths peek through layers of collaged and painted images and subserve as backdrops for delicate white-chalk drawings and scribbled numbers and words, which call up blackboards and Saunders's years of classroom service teaching art at huntsman College.

Organized by dint of guest curator W.H. Bailey, the exhibition sprawled above five distinctive rooms. The first was an installation with walls completely papered with torn hand-bills Saunders's paintings and drawings were hard to distinguish from the visual chaos. A scholastic theme was clear in another sweep where paintings were arranged like blackboards around a child's gymnasium desk. A vitrine and shelf held children's volumes toys and other memorabilia. The body Black Art and Culture in the Twentieth hundred attesting to the ongoing do one's bests of black artists, was included along with a transcript of the most recent edition of Janson's History of Art, which contains a reproduction of single of Saunders's paintings, connoting individual man's experience of that toil A large painting assembled of jazz photos, images of Black leaders, toy figurines in blackface, African plastic arts and masks, and a tiny birdhouse strike one as beings to refer to the black bottoms of jazz. In a self-portrait of sorts, the artist's name is charmed out with children's blocks.

Other fields showed different aspects of Saunders's output single presented uncharacteristically restrained, lyrical paintings whose primary motif is a calla lily delicately pay backed on a black ground. Another proposeed his interest in Asian calligraphy, which he surprisingly fortunately blends with more streetwise graffiti. Saunders operates between exuberance and poignancy, crude energy and elegance, muted outrage and meek humor. This vibrant show provided a chronicle of pleasure, pain and inescapable contradictions.

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