Tales from the Bubble: New Works by Berry Sanders at Co-Prosperity Sphere
by Madeleine Bailey
Berry Sanders
In a post-apocalyptic world of large-scale oil painting, an ambience conjuring the grainy uncertainty of the daguerreotype butts up against more desolate realities. Sanders’s works, 12 paintings on paper in addition to a site-specific wall painting, teeter on a post-industrial, post-modern hinge, drawn with a careful eye towards our own being in the world. The twelve works, although titled to elicit different literary and historical periods, from “Crime and Punishment” to “Sputnik,” feel distinctly crafted from the same journey. In the search for form in these melancholy landscapes, there is pleasure in piecing together narratives of past histories, some of which feel hauntingly familiar, others of which remain unfound.
Berry Sanders
Being at the show made me feel like I was in a deliberately ambiguous slide show of particularly morose snapshots of human nature. I was in an alternate envisioning of Apocalypse Now, past the point of turning back. Moments ranging from the almost painfully poetic “TV Nation” to the breath of the delicately painted open space in “Stampede” let me go on an emotional rollercoaster of free-form associations. From a painterly reference such as Francis Bacon and memories of a trip I had taken out West, to the current sate of our political climate, I let the works themselves shape my own disjointed path through the show. Perhaps least engaging to me was piece painted directly on the wall, which for some reason failed to draw me in as much as the works on paper. Perhaps because it was less labored with fewer layers to unbury, it seemed exist in a more essential way. This scene extended itself too far into my world, and left me less room to enter its narrative at my leisure.
Berry Sanders
Literally and metaphorically drawn in shades of grey, these are classical Western compositions delicately threaded with elements of Eastern ink painting. The calligraphic line meets the studied messy drip in landscape portraits that leave you unbalanced, the ground of time and place unsteady and uncertain beneath your feet. I left feeling that I couldn’t decide if I had been looking at the paintings or whether the paintings had been looking back at me.
Note: Also check out Martin Jon’s interview with Berry Sanders
