NEW YORK, NY.- Kristen Lorello is presenting a solo exhibition of paintings on paper by Brooklyn-based artist Christopher Saunders. This is the artist's first solo exhibition at the gallery. Six oil paintings on paper are being exhibited.
Each painting shares a similar compositional format in a vertical orientation. A large black rectangular frame, painted as a thin outline within a white border, is divided horizontally into two or three smaller sections. The outlines create a minimalist framework of stacked rectangles into which the artist paints sections of color gradient and atmosphere. This format registers visual aspects of the environments the artist has has inhabited - the vertical stretches of streets, sidewalks, and tall buildings of urban Manhattan and the broad, horizontal swathes of farmland, treetops, and blue sky of South Eastern Virginia. An overall palette of turquoise, blue, and gray prevails in each work, suggesting ocean and the various registers of sky. Shades of red, purple, and pink painted as tonal shifts and stark horizontal bands allude to a sunrise.
Saunders paints his surfaces by brushing oil paint layers in a wet on wet technique, and then sanding down layers of the paint to an even sheen. Each final work reveals no brush marks and has a totally slick surface similar to a glossy photograph. Photography plays a role in the artist's process. He takes pictures of outdoor scenes of light and movement and combines this imagery with other pictures he finds online and in books to create digital and paper collages. The collages provide starting points for his eventual paintings, which he renders intuitively with the photographic imagery in his mind's eye. Although painted by hand, in their stacked quality, each final painting retains a collaged feel, in part due to the different stages of craft. Saunders paints separate rectangular sections of each overall work during distinct studio sessions, and allows specific areas of the painting to dry before adding a new one. In the end, the different sections almost line-up so that the entire painting can be perceived as one overall image. At the same time, slight misregistrations between the different painted sections lend each tableau the sense of having been pieced together.
Christopher Saunders was born in Franklin, Virginia in 1972, and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He received an MFA from the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, in 1997 and a BFA in painting and printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University Richmond, VA in 1995. His works have been exhibited at Allegra LaViola Gallery, New York, and Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, East Hampton, New York, as well as Geary Contemporary, Millerton, New York, Bicycle Fine Art, New York, NY, Teckningsmuseet, Laholm, Sweden, and Davidson Contemporary, New York, NY, among others.
