Raymond Saunders should be approved

The easiest, laziest path to describing the confusing paintings of Raymond Saunders, is now investigated in a small but powerful review of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, possibly calling them “Rauschenbergian.” As Robert Rauschenberg once did, Saunders also showed a preference for messy scratches and dirty canvas, decorating with collected trinkets and trinkets and pictures tailored from the media. Saunders are also La Rauschenberg, producing works of art that feel like riddles, with their surfaces filled with mysterious symbols and visual puns.

If you work hard enough on this, you can crack Rauschenberg’s code, but Saunders’ puzzle is even more elusive. The longer I stared at the 35 pieces from his Carnegie Show, the less I seemed to know them.

I must have spent half an hour staring Channel: East, West 1 (1987), one of the many paintings here is the extensive use of black in the background. paragraph is monumentally scaled, just like many of its companions in the show, and features three chess boards, one drippy must-colored paint stroke, one appropriated reproduction of a Jan Brueghel still life (seemingly pinned to the canvas by a strip of tape but actually affixed to the surface by other means), one paintbrush (lightly used), several soap dishes (dirtied), what looks like wallpapering, and a whole lot more.

It is nearly impossible to divide all the connections between all these different objects, but the key to the painting may be a Bruegel poster, which depicts a vase stuffed with a vase. In the nearby chalk, Saunders naturally outlines his rendered rose, placing his perennials underneath a magazine with a picture of a bouquet scattered. Sanders seems to be playing a representative game, Q: What is the correct way for artists to portray the life of flowers still life? Can any of these pictures measure something real?

But wait, there are more. Although his own exercise failed, he figured out the most delicate image here – Chalk. Just when you think you know what Saunders is doing, you realize that you don’t get his art at all.

Apparently, Saunders succeeded in playing a role. But it takes a special artist to make sense for such slippery people, and Saunders is that rare talent. He shows that good painting should not be so easy to radiate their meaning, because art is a novel that can only bring us so close to the truth. He made the mistake feel good.

So far, Sanders has never received a retrospective – a fact that is surprising given his importance. “Black is a color,” his 1967 paper refuted Ishmael Reed’s notion that black art should prove a distinct black aesthetic and was widely read, winning admirers such as art historian Darby English, who once wrote Saunders “no matter that lost it.” Saunders performed with New York dealer Terry Dintenfass, who also represented artists such as Arthur Dove and Horace Pippin, who appeared on Kellie Jones’ game-changing 2012 show “Dig Now!

But until last year, when Sanders joined the rosters of Andrew Kreps and David Zwirner, it was felt that he hadn’t reached mainstream recognition, even as institutions steadily gained his art. Almost all of the works in the Carnegie exhibition are borrowed from the country’s major museums, from the National Art Gallery to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This shows that Sanders’ work has many admirers – even if many institutions rarely (if any) show these wonderful paintings. His Carnegie Show proved his worthy writing.

The exhibition curated by Eric Crosby is part of an attempt to make Saunders a legend in his hometown. Born in Pittsburgh in 1934, Saunders grew up to visit the museum’s Carnegie International Exhibition and the nearby Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Later, he recalled paintings by Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, as well as exhibitions of dinosaur fossils and dinosaur fossils filled with fake birds. Seeing all these different attractions in a museum complex seems to have instilled the obvious omnivorous sensitivity in his art.

Joseph C. Saunders, an art teacher in the Pittsburgh school system, began taking art classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and Carnegie Technology, before moving to Oakland, California in 1960.

There he began to make works defined by their dirty, dark strokes, including Night vision (1962), one of the blacks shrouded in what seemed to be a swamp, with almost no reeds peeking at the surface. The painting is one of the earliest paintings on the Carnegie Show, which shows that Sanders has tried to confuse the audience’s eyes. After all, it is not visible in the darkness.

Black also flourished in a painting a year later About something (1963), it is in line with the Saunders with the prevailing avant-garde model of the time. It has a string of numeric and letter strings that appear but are actually drawn, a gesture by Jasper Johns, another artist with optical illusion and aesthetic cryptographic significance.

something Feels a bit like Johns-lite, but Sanders started when it ended in the 60s No billing is issued (1968), in which blazing red monochrome ornaments play on the painter’s palette on the canvas. The palette is decorated with blue, breaking the purity of this long-term crimson rectangle, which also contains the tops of two traditional tape sections – perhaps a temporary cross, or more likely a crossroad.

Saunders not long No billing is issuedpainters regarded their craft as something sacred – abstract expressionist painter Barnett Newman once called his medium of choice “religious art.” Saunders adopted a larger sacrificial tack, partly because of the crucifixion with uneven tape in paintings from the 1970s and 1980s. A such work that began in 1975 was even called I’m not going to church anymore.

Just as Saunders did not worship on the Christian altar, he did not seem to respect art history. Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, United States (1988) Named after two great black modernists, both of whom were written by Sanders on his face. Like a lonely kid on a blackboard, Sanders also graffitied his name, instead giving more ideas to tear the posters, the children’s sketches and a candy box that he also included. Here, a piece of ephemera in the oxtail of a legendary (now failed) Auckland boutique known for its traits is more evident here than any allusion to Bearden or Lawrence.

With such works, Sanders seems to have intentionally produced illegible art. But, maybe the Carnegie Show won’t make his work more difficult to understand than necessary? Sanders’ quotes make up most of the wall text here; the show has no production catalogue. The lack of explanatory material makes these confusing works of art even more difficult to understand.

Indeed, Saunders’ art performed well enough, especially his 90s work, with more obvious political characteristics. Not always invited to dinner (1995), such as addressing racism and acceptance, placed appropriate images, including photos of Malcolm X, next to an advertisement for handmade soap, a piercing juxtaposition that suggests that black Americans will always be part of the pictures until someone decides to scrub them. You don’t need to know Saunders to get a lot from this painting.

But sometimes what Saunders is doing is partly because he always knows one thing: he is not trying to make art easy. “I’m not playing gallery here,” Saunders wrote in 1967. Gift of existence (1993–94). It consists of several doors decorated with dirt from various objects, Gift of existence Like Sanders’s declaration. Handwritten references to Lawrence and Bearden, as well as ready-made religious images and allegoricals, are also returned (here in the form of American flag painted in slop). Below, Saunders includes a wooden sign on the list of names paid by the jazz legend, saying “I’m retired.” The sign reads: “I am willing to pass the impulse when I feel the impulse of work.” Saunders will not explain the labor of the work to you, nor should he do it.