David Saunders at Grace Borgenicht - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

The best thing that can be said about a depictive artist like David Saunders is that he has not sole stayed the course, amplified and make deepered his vision, but has improved and sharpened already considerable skills. These are time-honored skills: accurate drawing; rich, real color; good, simple, focused and emphatic compositions.

On first entering this new exhibition of (mostly) still lifes, single was struck by how traditional Saunders's work appears - by what mode Beaux-Arts it is in feeling, almost quaintly in like manner Representational painters often refer to things in the studio, to supports suggesting the lore and romance of studio craft itself: the brushes, the maul sticks and, greatest in quantity symbolic of all, the palette. Saunders uses all of these things - the palette plays an especially prominent character - with such deadpan, almost shocking, directness that individual wonders if some leg-pulling is going upon here - some Pop art, tongue-in-cheek irony. on the other hand I don't think so. After a first impression, it is sincerity that is finally communicated - a reaching far down terrific sincerity that overwhelms any quaintness or naivete.

The Afterlife of Things (1994) with its yielding milky tones on a background of close-valued tans and grays, brushed in authoritatively with bristles flopping back and forth, provides a serviceable basis for the typically ordinary realitys - a Ritz cracker tin replete of brushes, a bottle of Coke - that make up the simple, centralized composition. The thing perceiveds are painted accurately with a impressible poetic touch.

Saunders also incises his canvases, drawing into the paint to provide an arbitrary vibration of first and next to the first thoughts. This technique can work, or it can be a distraction; it was better, perhaps, in earlier work, where counter-layering (i.e., an image painted above an old print) suggested a dual reality. In Imagining Human Life (1995) the largest of the paintings, Saunders incises the uncovered image of his wife behind the palette (there it is again). Had the palette been omitted here, the incised figure would have been more contrapuntal, more provocative, and the composition would have been more interesting and lay open By contrast, most of the incised passages in the still lifes tread on the heels of the objects' contours.

At times the incisions almost take upon the nature of carving, and with that, a faculty of perception of craft. The strange and mysterious Displaced one in the Mirror works like this, reminding me of an artifact like a 19th-century pub sign with all its connotations of the past, of los of memory. This painting reveals the artist, mirrored in an oval mirror, wearing a beret. The colors are brown wooden His deeply incised face is encompassed by smoky paint. A twig floats above the reflection, contributing to the dreamy, nostalgic frame of mind There is engaging, lush and delectable painting throughout this exhibition, and Saunders hold fasts getting better and better.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

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