One of the unifying threads in the work of Sam Bornstein, Loren Erdrich and Eric Sutphin is that each artist paints toward a moment of recognition. They each revel in the challenge of reconciling the painted surface with the mood or expression of their subject. A new mark can orient the image toward or away from resolution, or can shift the image away from its course toward something entirely new.
It's a little paradoxical. How do you recognize something you've never actually experienced? Since painting relies upon so many elements coming into coherence: the notion of recognition isn't limited to appearance, but rather, can extend to the recognition of a sensation, a gesture, an affective state. Painting is a unique catalyst in this sense. Since painting activates the body and the imagination, it can stimulate a sensation of recognition whether or not one has actually seen the thing before. This also has something to do with the sense of history embedded within each artist’s work. History manifests itself in both the accumulation of marks and the (sub)conscious allusions to the history of painting. In a concrete sense, painting is time made physical.
The work in this exhibition speaks to the present in two distinct ways. There's a feeling of solitude whether a single figure or group is present. Secondly, each artist gives themselves over to chaos and mystery in their search for something recognizable to appear. Sam Bornstein’s work flickers between pathos and folly. Painting becomes self reflective and materially reactive as the tussle between likeness and surface ensues. Loren Erdrich walks the line between legibility and dissolution; faces (embodied or otherwise) emerge from atmospheric expanses, beckoning one to look a little longer. Eric Sutphin synthesizes fragments of lived experience into dreamlike, sonorous tableaux. In Sutphin’s work, landscapes, figures and architecture seem to cleave under the weight of process. Taken together, the work in this exhibition conjures the sensation of recognition whether in the expression of a face, the feeling of an atmosphere or the twist of a familiar gesture.
