Name/Title
2015 Raymond Saunders: Black Is a ColorDescription
Modernist painter of international acclaim, Raymond Saunders dares his audiences to accept the fact that black really is just a color; one among many on the palette of any artist who seeks to emancipate himself and his practice from the binds of identity-driven art.
The Mary Porter Sesnon Gallery is honored to present Raymond Saunders: Black Is a Color, a solo exhibition featuring over twenty of the modernist painter’s most dynamic and challenging works to date. Concurrently, Raymond Saunders is showing at Lora Schlesinger Gallery in Santa Monica, California. His work can be found online with Wirtz Projects.
Having exhibited nationally and internationally since 1952, Saunders, working in a range of media from drawing to assemblage, interrogates the false premise that artists who are black produce something that can be uniquely identified as "black art." This exhibition, named after his notable 1967 pamphlet "Black Is a Color," showcases the profound ways Saunders troubles and refuses any easy associations of racial blackness with his deployment of the color black in his paintings as well as any past thematic readings of his body of work. The paintings on view incorporate traditional and nontraditional materials such as found objects, doilies, ephemera from his personal archives, and chalk. He often works and reworks paintings; sometimes subtracting and other times adding elements that may feel familiar, recalling the work of such contemporaries as Cy Twombly, Jasper Johns, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Yet, his combination of materials and the recurrence of certain motifs-flowers, urns, spirals-are unmistakably Saunders's own unique visual language, to which there is neither a key nor a legend. Like the artist himself, his paintings are masterfully improvisational, defiant, and unexpected.
