Scott Sandell Black Coral II unsigned gallery poster NR

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"Black Coral II"

SCOTT SANDELL

These latest works from the printmaker-painter Scott Sandell reflect a subtle shift in his way of looking at the natural world.  Those familiar with the earlier concerns of this highly individual American artist will find his distinctive motifs and fascinations here (as well as his care for the integrity of the printed surface), but Sandell's gaze has now gone beyond the forms of nature to the elemental energies that animate nature as a whole.  He has turned his eye upon light, wind, waves and gravity -- the primal forces that carve and delineate the raw matter of the universe.

Sandell's palette is the solar spectrum refracted through atmosphere and sea, or refined into the synthesized brilliance of the modern city.  In juxtaposing the black elegance of machine-generated type with the muted colors of granulated bone and shell, he suggests the real range of "earth tones" in a world that is both ancient and new.  The adaptive blues and reds of the tropical reef are duplicated in the modern world by new printing processes and materials.  It is the paradoxical play between these two creative forces -- the human and the natural -- that Sandell addresses in his unique use of color and form.

Like nature itself, the artist in his studio never creates something from nothing, but rather makes something from something else.  It is here in this "recombining" of elements that Sandell draws attention to the parallel between natural and mechanical means of reproduction.  In "Over The Falls," a print that refines the themes of his earlier work into a single visual haiku, Sandell contrasts two of his favorite pattern motifs: a simple sprig impressed woodcut-style beside blocks or Japanese characters selected for their beauty as pure form.  Reflecting both cultural and natural invention, the repeated leaf and the printed verbal symbols become ideographs in a visual koan, a riddle that explores the tension between these two inventive forces without resolving it.

The technical challenge for Sandell is to balance these contrasts, one of which is the simple power of color opposed to the complex method of realizing it on the print.  As always, Sandell has imbued these works with a degree of craftsmanship that extends beyond the image to the choice of handmade papers, inks, varnishes and overlay techniques.  His latest print editions, for example, involve eight or nine colors applied in various steps to a sheet of handmade Okawara paper, with a large sheet of arches paper serving as a field. Sandell often individualizes a print with painted brush strokes or primitive forms of photography, a technique in which raw light is used to trace the shadow-like image of an object upon the print's surface.

These methods are all part of what Sandell calls "third-generation abstract expressionism," the term he uses to describe his own place among American artists today.  Sandell acknowledges his debt to earlier painters and printmakers who have worked in the abstract-expressionist tradition, while distancing himself from the figurative-narrative trend that preoccupies many of his contemporaries.  Sandell says there is still much to accomplish with the primal elements of visual art -- pure form and color.  In his latest works, he masterfully uses these irreducible elements to portray the equally irreducible forces of light and energy without which there could be no stories, no figures and no landscapes.