Dana Saulnier: Nearly Distant
March 27–April 20, 2024, First Street Gallery, 547 West 27th Street, New York, NY
In preparing to write this review, my dog-eared, duct-taped Art & Culture sprouted an image of Clement Greenberg under a wizard’s hat, gazing into a crystal ball in search of what art critics might think of abstraction in the twenty-first century.
“The connoisseurs of the future”, he surmised in the essay, Abstraction, Representation and So Forth, “may be more sensitive than we to the imaginative dimensions and overtones of the literal and find in the concreteness of color and shape relations more ‘human interest’ than in the extra pictorial references of old-time illusionist art.”
In other words, the human race would eventually catch up with Clement Greenberg.
I tried to imagine what the champion of mid-century formalism would have made of Dana Saulnier’s canvases and drawings that were on exhibition at First Street Gallery last month. My feeling is that the old critic would have been unsettled initially, but perhaps temporarily. He did have an eye for talent.
Unlike many committed abstract painters today who flirt with spatial depth and the occasional image, yet hold fast to the security of the modernist surface, Saulnier shows no discomfort with illusionary space, or modeling, or receding planes, or atmospheric depth, or figurative suggestion. In the 1950s, taking such liberties with abstraction would have looked naïve. Saulnier apparently reads from a longer history. Not since Kynaston McShine, whose 1976 Natural Paradise show at MoMA, an exhibition that suggested Nineteenth Century Romantic landscape was at the root of Abstract Expressionism, have I seen anyone cross that threshold with such confidence. There may be many abstract painters today who blend abstraction with pictorial depth and sometimes mimetic imagery, but most are clearly reluctant to excavate too ardently lest they poke through the membrane and find they’ve switched sides. Figurative painters who utilize abstraction’s gestural lexicon seem much less anxious in that same space.
Our collective faith, or infatuation, or addiction to mid-century painting still rules our understanding of abstraction and perhaps modernism itself. Being a painter, I know why. There is nothing more exhilarating than to engage with a blank canvas and a broad brush, unencumbered by ideas. But the persistent apparition is likely to confound anyone responding to a key feature of Saulnier’s work—its fundamental spontaneity.
Saulnier is a genuinely serendipitous painter and maintains that distinction despite utilizing methodically developed charcoal drawings and smaller color studies, generous examples of which are in the First Street show. And yet despite this near academic tack, his final canvases retain their extemporal character. They are abstract paintings of a different order, an order that resists both mid-century mythopoetics and post-modern relativism. They are manifestations of a genuinely unique vision, compelling enough to dispel any suggestion of having been created to merely stand apart from the crowd.
“Three”, which in First Street’s modest exhibition space best conforms to Saulnier’s preferred scale of roughly six by eight feet, offers an opportunity to engage with a work of painterly abstraction that owes almost nothing to de Kooning, though in sensibility owes quite a bit to Goya. Offsetting the atmosphere of the painting’s general gloom sits a cluster of pale forms leaning to the left as if pressured by an unseen force. These ambiguously defined masses are lit dramatically, but from indecipherable sources. Some seem to radiate their own light. Others are so dark that they can be read alternately as shadows or solid masses. Saulnier’s limited palette of black and white, with diminutive notes in primary hues, delivers no recognizable objects or creatures, though there are vague, almost offhand suggestions of both. In this particular canvas, a raised arm in the upper right quadrant appears like a single joker in an otherwise standard deck.
As the painting’s space and volume provide much of its visual potency, a general landscape reading is inevitable. What sort of landscape is another matter. The paintings foreground murk, for instance, could be either a reflective pool or a mass of tangled ground cover. Either way, its foreboding is tempered by an absence of narration.
If I were to follow McShine’s lead and posit an AbEx precursor, I’d look to Saulnier’s leaning forms as an echo of Lee Krasner’s agitating shapes of the late 1950s. I admit that’s quite a leap. But in making it, I can then see a link to Inka Essenhigh’s biomorphic gardens; another contemporary painter of iconoclastic tendencies whose work, when considered in the same context as Saulnier’s formal heresies, can get weirdly close to Krasner’s arabesques.
Greenberg, and pretty much his entire generation, lacked the ideological flexibility to indulge in such gambits. But three years before he penned the quote that began this review, Jorge Luis Borges had already clarified for the cultural community that artists create their precursors. And when they do, they can slip out of a constraining paradigm—in this case, a painter of genuine originality who is reviving possibilities old Clem chose to dismiss as “the extra pictorial references of old-time illusionist art”.