Dana Saulnier

The work attempts to create both a visceral spatial experience of the body and a critical dialogue into two basic modes of understanding our being: our body as site, understood as encompassed within the plenitude of nature and our lost relationships to spiritual traditions especially as they have been expressed in paintings of the figure in landscape, an image which remains the nominal subject of the image.

Reductive, open, incomplete, fleshy, and gestural figural forms interact within a dense, claustrophobic atmosphere. Boundaries between figure and ground are permeable, evoking transience and uncertainty. Yet the forms remain grounded, weighty, present with us. Extensive iterations of drawing precedes painting and a similar attitude continues in making the paintings where the clearly visible layering of materials acts as dense record of the bodily presence of the artist and as a concurrent negotiation with the identity and dissolution of the forms giving direction to the cognitive experience of the work. The paintings act as experiential sites of shifting locations and multiple boundaries operating directly in the perception of the works, and as an analogue for the critical dialogue that results in questioning categorical formulations such as inner- outer, body-space, matter – spirit, past – present, history – contemporary.

Considering the historical consciousness manifest in the work they evoke distance, absence, and the given facts had in continually finding ourselves located in such a state of being. The compositions encompass (embrace? parody?) twentieth century reductive gestural abstraction while also re-negotiating a lost and distant spiritual stability as present in baroque and renaissance figurative iconography. Utilizing selected enclosed modalities of ‘Western Painting’ as a site for experiment these works risk traditional methods and surfaces.

Jeanne Fryer-Kohles writing about the historical address of the work for the exhibition “Icons of Presence: Icons of Absence” at the Weston Art Gallery in 2004, states, “He seems intent on reconfiguring their scattered, shattered histories into endless permutations that confer on his own works a mantle of solidity, tenderness, and travail. He enhances this effect, in part, by acknowledging the elemental earthiness of earth; it shows in his assertion of paint’s tactile materiality and in his hallmark palette of earth colors: umbers, siennas, ochres and greens. The mingling of earth, whether through color or imagery, with the artist’s own life- world, shines throughout. Earth, weighty, impassive and inert is always leavened with the physical and intellectual energies that Saulnier brings to bear on his works. His use of paint as paint induces tension as it collides with an array of awkward, allusive forms.”*

This dense, layered, and historically self conscious mode of picture making seeks to ‘make present’ a space for the ‘questions of absence’ that our being traverses.

*Excerpted from the essay “Icons of Presence, Icons of Absence”, Weston Gallery, Cincinnati, OH, Jeanne Fryer-Kohles, 2004.

See additional work at Artists File Online