Eric Sanders

Eric Sanders: The Necessity of Art

Eric Sanders, based in Manhattan Beach, California, sold his business in 2014, and from that moment forward, he has been making investigative abstract work in multiple styles and media with an unabashed Herculean drive. Taught as a child by his father, who was an amateur artist of enthusiastic conviction, Sanders returned to painting out of psychic necessity. His works of art, marvelously varied, incorporate simultaneous aspects of both expressionist abstraction and minimalism with subtler aspects of the automatic writing found in the abstract surrealism of Miro and Gorky; they seem to have mysteriously evolved into a lyricism of a newer sort. Colors merge and overlap; forms can be distinct or indistinct. What he effectively communicates more than anything else is, in fact, a paradox: a melding of cohesive patterns with unbridled, freewheeling energies. Sanders is working within an established abstract idiom, but the thrust of his work breaks through any existing mold and expresses a unique poetic vision.

Reservoir Abstract Series No. 5 (2019), is a mid-size abstraction in which a rounded mustard yellow form, with a small curved extrusion rising out of the main shape, looks to be purely nonobjective. It might be a body of water, as the title suggests; but the darker yellow color of the image, on a background of black, argues against a firm affirmation of that reading. Whatever the origins of the painting, it is a strikingly strong abstraction. The form emphasizes the energies of the brush while some black from the background shows through. Dirty Dozen Series No. VIII (2018) consists of two black masses, one at the top and another one, thick horizontal, located in the lower third of the composition. A series of straight drips in black descends from the top mass over the lower one to the bottom of the piece. In the middle is a light blue passage, overlapped by the drips, while off to the upper right, a black passage occurs, allowing white to show through., and the lower part of the painting is white.

While the two paintings are dissimilar, both are characterized by an inherently gifted and intuitive hand. Sanders is a highly productive artist who can turn out more than a few canvases in a short period. His ability to vary imagery from one work to the next, within a brief window of time, makes him an artist of genuine versatility. In Trapezoid No. 1 (2018), two angular geometric shapes, with differing lengths to their sides, are painted in a slightly mottled brown. They are placed on top of a large yellow mass, which glows orange as it ascends. The mass is inchoate, lacking definition. Other effects, a deep mauve occurs on the upper part of the painting, on either side of the orange blotch, underneath, are a series of pale white stripes. The background of this painting is blue. In Modern MontaukNo. 1 (2019), the influence of de Kooning is palpable: formless passages of black, yellow, blue mixed with white fit together like a puzzle, with a blue column standing in the middle right, which holds our attention. But this painting is more than mere homage; while it nods to the great ab-ex artist, it also can stand confidently on its own.

In Framed (2019), we see two frames outlined in black--one on the upper left and the other toward the center of the artwork. Both act as a painting frame might--within the larger frame of the entire composition. They contain abstract passages--white and black on the top and white and blue on the lower frame--while around and off to the sides of these recognizable forms are various areas of color (black, blue, gray, white), with a thinnish stripe and drips descending the middle of the painting. The witty title here indicates that Sanders is deliberately invoking the frame as an important part of his work of art, which we often ignore out of force of habit.

Sanders is improvising throughout the paintings described here and looks to the moment when the brush makes the stroke so that the image is reflected in both the action that produced it and the fixed record occurring immediately thereafter. He is a painter to admire--a skilled artist who makes his point well. One of the most striking aspects of the strength in his work is its all-encompassing variety; while immersed in these investigations, the paintings simultaneously offer differing stylistic vocabularies, but remarkably it is still not difficult to attribute their characteristics to a single hand.

--Jonathan Goodman