Painter Eric Sall emerged on the Kansas City art scene while still an undergraduate at the Kansas City Art Institute. Since graduating in 1999, he has rapidly risen professionally, while his art has steadily gained in power and maturity, offering up increasingly intense surprises, pleasures, and challenges. A committed abstractionist, Sall relishes the bold and inventive manipulation of oil paint and the construction of strong spatial and figure-ground relationships. He draws inspiration from disparate abstract styles of the past, bringing together seemingly irreconcilable elements of Abstract Expressionism, Hard-edge and Color Field abstraction, and Op art to create audaciously original nonrepresentational paintings, often large and physically imposing. Sall’s paintings of the early 2000s tend to feature hulking, centralized forms suggestive of tottering pieces of furniture or lumbering animals, their interiors filled with brightly colored, thickly painted stripes, dots, squiggles, or smudges, their edges more crisply defined. The contrast between the treatment of edges and interiors creates a productive tension between spontaneous and controlled paint handling—the former redolent of the Abstract Expressionist gestural style of Willem de Kooning and Hans Hofmann, the latter of the Hard-edge mode of Ellsworth Kelly and Jack Youngerman. Sall’s heavy, central forms—the paintings’ protagonists, as it were—occupied environments of more delicately applied, subtly modulated color, typically divided into different zones, with a solid band at the base of the composition suggesting a horizon line. Although generated through the process of pure painting, without reference to real-world objects, Sall’s canvases conjured weird creatures or structures inhabiting abstracted landscapes or architectural spaces, making art seem, paradoxically, to be figurative and nonrepresentational simultaneously. In recent years Sall’s work has grown more ambitious, daring, and complex. With some exceptions—there is no such thing as a typical Eric Sall painting—he continues to focus each composition on a mass of assertively variegated, clustered, and layered colors, forms, and patterns. Sometimes centered, sometimes entering the picture from the side, these agglomerations of color and shape may be planted at the base of the composition or hang suspended within luminous grounds, against flat color bands, or amid motley painterly environments. Each painting is different, yet they all vibrate with Sall’s unique artistic sensibility—energetic, adventuresome, and boundlessly inventive. —David Cateforis
Posted on: Thu, 25 Jul 2013 23:13:05 +0000
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