ART CITIES:Los Angeles-Adam Saks
Adam Saks belongs to the early-2000s generation of painters who pull freely from various artistic sources. He is known for picking his subject matter from different periods of art history and visual culture, thereby deriving fascinating parallels and meaning: the themes rise from art history and previous visual art and from pop art and outsider art. His breakthrough came with his watercolor and paintings’ tattoo motifs, with human figures and torsos situated around architectural fragments and landscape scenes.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo Meliksetian|Briggs Gallery Archive
The new works, made especially for “Pilgrim on a Hidden Path” that is his first solo exhibition in the U.S.A., reflect Saks’ ongoing exploration of pictorial construction, image making and painterly language and techniques. The impetus for the new paintings are based on Saks’ recent experience of the French Way of the Camino de Santiago, an 800 kilometer journey he made on the pilgrim’s trail from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, France to Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Walking in solitude on the trail, save for his fellow travellers, with only a few possessions in his backpack, moving on to different locations daily, Saks found himself on the margins of society, detached from the usual conventions of daily life. Back in his Berlin studio, this journey led him to develop new pictorial forms to convey the emotions and sensations experienced on the historical trail. Saks’ paintings in the exhibition are defined by a balance and interaction of abstract and figurative elements. They are comprised of three equally important components; the dynamic of drawing in oil stick, the immediacy of lino cut printing, in oil paint, directly on to the canvas, and the manipulation of the painterly plane. Various motifs from the walk, and Saks’ experiential state recur, discarded boots, vegetation, animals, knotted ropes and distended limbs for instance, acting as both representative and emotive images as well as com-positional and structuring devices. As Saks states “by borrowing source material from high and low culture as well as by negating the distinction between the cultural values they encompass, these emotions gain an anti-hierarchical form of paint-erly contemporaneity.” Saks’ approach to imagery, at once historical and atemporal, resonates in an atavistic manner. Formally, space, volume and imagery collapse in upon itself in some works, and are pushed to the edges in others, leaving a central void. These contrasts, oscillations, concentrations and dispersions are central to Saks’ painterly processes.
Info: Meliksetian|Briggs Gallery, 313 N. Fairfax Avenue, West Hollywood, Los Angeles, Duration: 22/9-17/11/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 12:00-17:00, www.meliksetianbriggs.com
