How Much Would It Cost Me to Buy a Peter Sacks Piece of Art?
"For the coolness of these paintings is not a thing of technique or cognition but a mapping of the erosion of feeling—its sediments and strata. The poignancy of these images, entirely at odds with their scale and abstraction, evokes a world that is captive yet resistant to the historical world: a globe that summons in the viewer something like the mysterious touch on and the irretrievable motives of 1 nether enchantment, one controlled from afar."
Daniel Tiffany
Sampler and Sediment: The Art of Peter Sacks
Wade Wilson Fine art, Houston, Oct 29 – December xi
Necessity 14
Peter Sacks is a South African painter, now residing in the U.South., with a distinguished history as a poet and literary critic. Responding to the virtually contempo exhibitions of his paintings (in New York and Houston), ane could introduce his work past maxim a few words about late modernism, or about an African variant of modernism (see his Migration series), or almost exile and painting, or fifty-fifty about poetry and painting. Many of Sacks' paintings, for example, incorporate fragments of texts, typed out by the artist on scrolls of cloth with a manual typewriter. And in some of these paintings, if one looks closely, 1 discovers scraps of poetry (Rilke, Celan) pressed into the sweetness of decay (Visitation 1 (Celan), for example).
Visitation 1 (Noah), detail
Thinking about Africa, or modernism, or poetry in relation to Sacks' paintings would not exist inappropriate, given the context of the artist's work and some of its dominant stylistic backdrop (scale, brainchild, collage), along with its melancholy affinities for text and textile (Visitation 3 (Job and Dante), for instance). Still Sacks appears to have found a way to deploy the tool kit of modernism to ends more or less alienated from the conventions of modernist credo: formal experiment, depersonalization, critique. For the coolness of these paintings is not a matter of technique or cognition but a mapping of the erosion of feeling—its sediments and strata. The poignancy of these images, entirely at odds with their scale and abstraction, evokes a globe that is convict however resistant to the historical world: a world that summons in the viewer something like the mysterious impact and the irretrievable motives of i under enchantment, one controlled from distant.
Visitation 3 (Job and Dante)
Responding to this phenomenon in Sacks'southward paintings is hard to talk about: the images deepen one's solitude, bringing one to the threshold of "frozen tears"—a crystalline germination of inaccessible feeling. Facing these images, I felt several times the impulse to weep abreast the paintings, but the anticipated suppression of such feelings seemed as well to be implicit in the performance of the paradigm. Information technology was equally if these saturnine—and saturnalian—images caught me upward in a formalism spider web, then released me into a kind of nostalgia, all the while standing to demark me, to suspend me inches autonomously from the realization of feelings summoned by these paintings.
Migration 15
Seeking to ascertain more closely the effects of modesty or deferral, one could also say that in that location is something atavistic but besides domestic about the discoveries induced by Sacks' paintings. The viewer is at once enchanted and forewarned by the artist'southward preservation of scavenged lace, linens, garments, shawls, in these compulsive tableaux (Necessity 14, for instance). The apprehensive materials embedded in these large, series images hover as well in the bearding well of those arts—such as stitchery—that are produced without expectation of recompense or fifty-fifty acknowledgement, reminding u.s.a. how mysterious the relation between identity and artifact must remain. These paintings might help us to relearn how to make art in this way, how it might exist possible to produce works without signatures–at any scale–to return the enigma of the sampler, the embroidered pillow case, or the lace collar. In addition, the apply of corrugated materials in many of the paintings—Visitation 1 (Noah), or Summoning 5, for example—suggests a kind of quilting, or honeycomb, associated with these "pale" arts. For similar reasons mayhap, i discovers in the paintings of deep, obliterating color—Necessity 9 or Summoning 20 for example—the welling-fourth dimension of an amber fossil: a lone, garbled clue trapped within its sumptuous depths.
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