Dream Big

Eric Sall

About the exhibition

“Dream Big” highlights a variety of styles, genres, materials and processes that typify Eric Sall's recent work. Embracing process and material, Sall makes paintings that float somewhere between representation and abstraction. While these paintings allude to the presence of something familiar, like an object or shape, their dense layers of markings and effects shroud themselves in mystery, movement and mood.
Within this series of paintings, he touches on portraiture, landscape, still life and abstraction while moving between pastel drawings on canvas, oil and acrylic paintings made with brushes and palette knives, and monumental paintings made with brooms and house paint on recycled billboard vinyls. The colossal canvases of Sall are drenched in bright, bold kaleidoscopic patterns and designs that consume the viewer while inviting closer inspection and contemplation through his use of line, color and depth.
Each painting starts with a simple mark made to the canvas and every move that follows is a response to the one that came before. Over the course of time, paintings that begin as intuitive, gestural abstractions develop into more idiosyncratic pieces. Recurring themes, patterns and specific motifs show up again and again, such as plants, stripes, hands, circles, and hats. While these works seem quite disparate when taken out of context, specific processes of drawing and painting bring together contrasting elements in unexpected ways. What does a painting of plants have to do with a painting of dots you might ask? To Sall, they feel quite related, to the point where one painting might seem to bleed into another.

“Part of my painting process is intuitive and improvisational, resulting in ethereal atmospheres and physical sweeping gestures, while another aspect can be more calculated and tedious, mimicking the methods of pattern making and surface decoration more commonly associated with craft and design. Through a process of call and response, I add layers of paint to the canvas and then scrape, pull, subtract, re-build, dismantle and reconstruct again, creating paintings that are at once strangely familiar, yet decidedly non-representational.”

www.ericsall.com
@ericsall76