“Painting gives me a sense of the world as I’ve lived it. It helps tell me what and who I am. I meet my several selves somewhere in the midst of painting; one is a kind of itinerant intellectual who wants to use painting to make a point about history and language, and the other is a hollow shell that painting passes through making weird noises as it goes.”
The lyrical paintings of Mark Sadler perform, along with his words and his music, as repositories for existential questions found across cultures. As Sadler says, the act of painting and that of song are coupled as a vector in the transmission of history and in the aspiration toward future knowledges. Escaping a linear narrative of time, Salder’s paintings calls on the viewer to time travel with the depiction of schematic figures inhabiting different architectural spaces and overlapping eras, and to experience the work similar to embodying the spatial dimensions of sound and spoken word.
Laden with registers of meaning and references, coalescing as philosophical, historical and poetic layers, the time frame of the contemplative is at work in Sadler’s abstract landscapes becoming counter responses to the accelerating situation of post-industrial capitalism. These painted assemblages also call to question how to be collectively anomalous. A playful subversion to the rules is evident.
Exhibitions
BURSTING AT THE SEAMS BOILING POINT OF DREAMS
Uptan2012 oil on canvas 200 x 180 cm
Blue Pavilion2011 oil on canvas 400 x 180 cm
Red Romans2011 oil on canvas 200 x 180 cm
Seneca2011 oil on canvas 220 x 180 cm
Breakers2011 oil on canvas 220 x 180 cm