SAM STILL: Talking Drawings Review by Dewitt Cheng

K. Imperial Fine Art, San Francisco

Contemporary art never stops developing; apparently, like a shark, if it stops, it dies—and perhaps gets preserved in formaldehyde by Damian Hirst. Recent shocks of the new which the art world is trying to digest are the use of digital money like Bitcoin; Non-Fungible Tokens, and jpeg ownerships sold as investment vehicles that enjoy a ghostly semi-life divorced from physical objects and can even survive the deliberate physical destruction of the source objects, as Hirst demonstrated recently by burning drawings, leaving behind only their NFT simulacra; and now, the brave new world of word-to-image Artificial Intelligence, harnessing the power of Dall-e and similar programs to bypass traditional skills entirely.

In this vaporous context, the large abstract drawings of Sam Still come as a welcome respite, weighing in as authoritatively Old School, i.e., committed to the artist’s vision and artist’s hand, while pushing the envelope of art by combining elements of Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and Process Art into a compelling new synthesis. Sill has spoken of making his work “with a conversation in mind.” His labor-intensive works belie what may at first appear to be pure black forms, multiplied to create patterns or textures, or presented singly in silhouettes or shadows. Look more closely, however, and the obsessive even oddly devotional aspect of the work becomes apparent. The shapes are composed of multiple layers of India ink that create a dark, shiny skin or pelt, a few millimeters thick, seemingly fused to the matte rag paper substrate, with what Still calls “obsessively calculated edges.” The artist burnishes the surface with a hard, shiny agate stone a tool borrowed from leatherworking. The show’s title, Talking Draw-ings, initially seems anomalous, since blackness implies silence in Western culture and art consider the radical black end-of-history paintings of Kasimir Malevich and Ad Reinhardt—but the works’ obdurate, concentrated focus will speak to some viewers although I imagine the works as communicating vessels (to hijack a Surrealist term) for evocative mantras rather than declarative diagrammable sentences.

Still’s reductively meditative art comprises “simple shapes, repeated or isolated, in ink, balanced with emphatically flat silhouettes of organic shapes as well as rectangles that are divided and or connected, others with exposed white shapes, that when engaged over a prolonged period, will oscillate between object and opening.” This intriguing perceptual ambiguity is accompanied by a parallel oscillation between how we interpret the works: as abstract iconic forms, powerfully present Barnett Newman saw his abstractions as one-to-one human encounters and as stylized, mysterious deceptions of things that we cannot quite decipher; Still’s numbered titles provide no hints so that viewers’ imaginations are enlisted. The long, flattened tubular forms of 2019.061, for example, with their pulsing bulges, may suggest rolled-out pastry to some, or biological specimens, or studies of fluid mechanics. The scalloped edges of the rounded rectangle in 2021.023 suggest doilies and crimped pie crusts, but what are we to make of the strange apertures at the center: a four-pointed star, or a stylized animal pelt? The tall rectangles of 2018.072/2018, with their rounded right-hand corners, suggest cutouts of capital D’s in slightly different fonts, one squarer and one more rounded, or perhaps unseen pieces of fabric for some strange garment. The square forms of 2020.033 and 2021.032 have scalloped rectangles cut into them; the sawtooth pattern suggests cactus or insect predation, and the resultant W and M forms add yet another layer of possible interpretations.

The variety within the unity of Still’s obsessive oeuvre is impressive. This dedication to craft and to the discovery of the image in its very making harks back to the idea of the artist as a kind of visionary artisan in a time when much contemporary art seems voulu, i.e., calculated and strategic. Beneath the shining surfaces of Still’s post-minimalist structures lies, paradoxically, an unwavering Romantic sensibility in pursuit of the Sublime.

by Dewitt Cheng