Raymond Saunders: Déménagement

Saunders once called Paris—where he kept a studio, spent summers, and regularly exhibited during the 1990s and 2000s—“a home away from home,” embracing the French capital as a generative place for art making and community building. The city offered a hopeful environment and freer way of life with fewer of the social and racial constraints endemic to American culture, one that held opportunities for artists to be in broader conversation with audiences and institutions at large. Saunders acted on this by opening his studio as a residency of sorts to his students visiting from California, offering them some of the same opportunities that he was given in decades prior.

Saunders’s dynamic bricolagist approach is evident in the paintings on view in the main gallery. Generally defined by a monochromatic black ground and square-format composition, these paintings on wood panel or canvas are often worked over with white chalk—both a pointed reversal of the traditional figure-ground relationship and a nod to Saunders’s decades spent as a teacher. Enhanced with a characteristic range of other markings, materials, and talismans—some directly linked to the artist’s Parisian life—these compositions demonstrate his singular aesthetic. Many works incorporate motifs that recur throughout Saunders’s mature oeuvre, such as scrawling text, urnlike vases, and flowers, some resembling nonnative species whose presence suggests a transatlantic migration.

Also exhibited is a selection of paintings made on doors and panels, all of which originate from Saunders’s time in Paris. These works, which are often displayed leaning against the wall, further blur the boundaries between painting and assemblage and open themselves to additional layers of meaning. Installed together, these towering paintings inhabit a physicality that suggests both presence and displacement—embodying an artist who works across mediums, formats, and cities to produce an oeuvre that is at once constructed and improvisatory, didactic and deeply felt.

An adjacent gallery space contains a focused installation of intimate, elegantly restrained depictions of flowers rendered in watercolor and graphite on white paper. Sparse, graceful, and a surprising counterbalance to the larger, black-ground paintings, these compositions showcase the fine and occasionally whimsical quality of Saunders’s line. The artist has employed lyrical contours and gestural marks to depict single or multiple blooms that, grouped together, resemble a chart of floral species or a collection of flower pressings.