RAYMOND SAUNDERS

Paintings & Works on Paper

April 19 - May 26, 2001

BIOGRAPHY

PRESS RELEASE

Raymond Saunders' masterfully constructed assemblages have a fresh and spontaneous quality that juxtaposes words and images from world culture with his personal artistic interests and preoccupations. Saunders' keen sense of composition, form, and texture is balanced by his erudite use of color. His surfaces are spattered with expressionistic swaths of paint, richly colored, with delicately drawn figures, or inscribed with chalked words, names, and numbers. Saunders often uses materials from daily life such as handbills, comics, signs, old doors, which he has culled from his frequent travels. There is an abundance of invented and appropriated imagery and iconography which reference race, war, family, religion, poverty, wealth, people, and places amongst other subject matter. His powerful painting and fluid, spirited compositions combine to give the works a dense and engrossing narrative power.

One cannot analyze Saunders' works without the ability to move within the ebb and flow of his evolving and ever-changing aesthetic. Saunders merges an improvisational, intuitive element in his paintings with a carefully conceptualized component that draws the viewer in.