SAUL CHASE

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The Paintings of Saul Chase
By Ariana Reines

I've Saul Chase says, resolutely, that he has never ever painted “from life”. A defiant Platonist, he has no compunction at all in his pursuit of an ideal, of what he calls the excitement of first vision. It’s not about the thing you’re seeing, but the feeling you get in seeing it for the first time. Which feeling he’s been laboring to put into paint for the past thirty-five years. His lyrical landscape-based abstractions sound an echo somewhere between European Impressionism and Richard Diebenkorn. They combine a revelry in pure color with a subtle investigation of depth in flatness.

Saul Chase started out painting razor-sharp cityscapes in a muted palette that looks like smoggy fresco. That was the nineteen seventies. Just when he made the move to the ripe pastorals on view at Maya Stendhal is unclear, but it may have coincided with his decision to leave New York. (“Soho was too gentrified for me. I hated running into people in the mornings when I’d be out walking my dog. They ruined the landscape.”) Much of Chase’s work over the past twenty years has been on two series: The Beautiful Hours, small oil paintings on paper, and Answering Light, acrylics on gessoed panel. Both series are landscape-derived, though The Beautiful Hours is more overtly pictorial, insofar as the paintings function as scenes, while the Answering Light series seems to abstract both from and into nature (or from nature dreamt, nature remembered) in a way that recalls Nicolas de Stael. As would befit the work of a Platonist painter, the two series function together as a kind of dialogue—between paint and visual memory, between dream and color, flatness and depth.

The paintings in "Answering Light", acrylics on gessoed wood panel, all purport a seeming flatness that winds up becoming an inviting depth. They mimic fresco not just in the way Chase’s use of gesso mutes and mattifies, but in the way that any “action” taking place on the surface of the work has an airy fixity, disallowing any depth or sense of perspective, bringing everything to the fore. Almost all of these paintings involve a horizon line and in all of them flatness functions as a kind of double-entendre, but not in the way of a late Rothko, standing as a kind of portal, but rather as a gesture to the way the eye knits all remembered images into one motley tissue. Chase's abstract landscapes are trying to see into themselves. This may sound abstract, and it is, but take a look at Magnificent Billboard on a Sultry Afternoon. The billboard in question is a furzy Hokusai great wave of sorts, or perhaps a frond-covered rookery, and sits in the midst of generous stripes in the varied colors of candied almonds. We have the “plastic” image, the billboard, surrounded by the “natural” world, the sultry landscape that is all lavender, periwinkle, caramel. It is a tease, a witty elocution of the relationship between utilitarian, mimetic objects and the "natural" world that teems around them.

Take a closer look at some of the paintings in Answering Light and you'll notice fine rulings in graphite. These seem to function as mock perspective guides, as the rigorous networkings superimposed upon what might seem at first to be purely color improvisations. They gently reassert all the old questions about flatness, mimesis, and memory.

The paintings in “The Beautiful Hours” are of a romanticism rarely seen in contemporary art. They reveal Chase’s self-assured brushwork in a dewy richness, thanks to oil paint, that makes them seem much larger than they are. “Porcelain Sky” is a lovely one: gossamer striations along a gentle diagonal are an achievement of technical control. Sometimes he even manages to make oil paint look like watercolor, as in “Sunlit Sarcophagus”, where a single brushstroke creates the stone edifice in question, and where the varied sky suggests the watercolors of Winslow Homer.

Chase has arranged the paintings of “The Beautiful Hours” into diptychs, triptychs, polyptychs, and floated them in plexiglass boxes. This underscores their lives as objects, not simply as images, and inevitably calls to mind the tradition of religious iconography. The whole process of entering a painting of diminutive stature, rather than being enveloped Abstract-Expressionist-style by a vast canvas, has religious antecedents. Something about the process of looking into a small landscape and imagining oneself inside it, rather than being assailed by overpowering size, makes the mind somehow more active in the process of transubstantiation that looking is. “They are Rorschachs,” Chase has said of his paintings, and when one sees them grouped together and hung in boxes, they seem an intriguing kind of evidence.

For those who remember Chase’s architectural paintings and screen prints from the seventies, his more recent voluptuousness will look like a radical thematic and formal departure. The architectural paintings are feats of draftsmanship; they are about a collusion of line and angle; they are also profoundly lonely. They share with the later work a simple frontal composition and dewy palette; it is worth thinking them over for a while, especially if the paintings in Answering Light and The Beautiful Hours seem a little too pretty to you at first.