Something Between Want and Desire: Sean Landers: "North American Animals"

Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Sean Landers: "North American Animals"

Sean Landers, Fawn (Strange Progeny), 2014

I have always been a fan of Sean Lander's text paintings and was thrilled to see a link to his recent exhibition, North American Animals, at the Petzel Gallery. From the gallery's press release:

"The exhibition “North American Mammals” is divided into three groups of paintings, each of which spiderweb in reference to one another. The first group is comprised of nine paintings depicting steel gray library bookshelves holding neatly stacked books. Each of the tightly painted book spines directs their vertically embossed titles out to the viewer. The titles have the surreal ability to disassociate themselves from the painted image, as if to float beyond their representational bounds. As the titles are read from left to right, they complete each chapter of Landers’s prose. Rather than the artist’s well-known Joycean stream-of-consciousness writing, the new work ruminates with an existential voice. Themes run from the eternal existence of a painting [Mountain Goat (An Argument for Solipsism) and Boar (Brueghel the Archer)] to collecting and being collected [Howler Monkey (Casting it Back Out to Sea) and Hare (The Promiscuity of Art)] to the core attributes of being an artist [Jaguar (The Urgent Necessity of Narcissism for the Artistic Mind) and Pony (When Performance Becomes Reality)]."

Sean Landers, Hare (The Promiscuity of Art), 2014

Sean Landers, We're All, 2014

Sean Landers, On the Nature of Daylight, 2014

Sean Landers, Strange Progeny (Fawn), 2013

Landers writes: “These tartan animals represent the first time that I ever thought of my paintings in such a deliberate parent-like fashion. I have cloaked them in tartan fur to help protect them from indifference on their journey through time.”