The Art Tourist visits contemporary painting at Site
Santa Fe
Car paint shows off for the Contemporary Art scene
by Terry Talty
July 2, 2005
Santa Fe, NM – I have an anvil on the pedal driving
from Colorado to Albuquerque listening to a book on tape -- the memoirs of the
former secretary of state, Madeline Albright -- and I pull off the highway into
the gravel parking lot of Site Santa Fe – a contemporary art space. With
Madelineıs voice left in the car, it only took a few seconds for the dusty, hot
New Mexico atmosphere to clarify my dreamy mind, and it was a good
thing
because in this edgy neighborhood of Santa Fe it would only take a few seconds
to walk from the car, along a modern gang plank and through the doors into the
white walled, tall, warehouse-gone-Architectural-Digest space that is Site
Santa Fe – a replica of a great European contemporary museum in one of
Americaıs greatest art towns.
On the walls inside the vacuous building are shiny boxes of
color; 3-foot slick squares nested together like mosaics whose elements mutated
large – but stopped short of going wall-to-wall. These assemblies of car
paint covered surfaces stick out of the wall assigned to them – beautiful
and vivid. These objects of color by Santa Fe painter, Paul Sarkisian, make me
ask myself, ³what has painting – paintings like this – to do with
being human today?
They are meditative and pleasant in this clean space and my
breathing has completely changed from the highway tug and sigh pace Iıd been at
just minutes before. And I want to stay minutes and minutes more in this calm.
I did not notice the beauty of the car paint when I was out among thousands of
example of it on the four-lane congested, construction-ridden section of state
highway from Espanola to Santa Fe. Here I was enjoying a mélange of oranges and
golds – a car color Iıd never choose. There were none of the obsequious
silvers that litter the supermarket parking lots.
Sarkisian made a name for himself in the 60s in L.A. by
being a hyperrealist and this show included one painting from that period. It
was interesting from an historical perspective – Latin named shops with
Spanish window signs in the middle of the American city – as an example
of the roots of US hispanicazation. But it is a cold as the car painted
paintings. Itıs about a surface that looks like a photograph. This is textured
surface that looks like paint – industrial plasticized paint.
And why is it put together like mosaics? Like the triptych
idea – donıt you always think that someone is too cheap to buy a bigger
canvas? If it needs three images to tell the story, do the three images,
otherwise weıre looking at three paintings and wondering why they go together,
and we could have just been looking a the paintings. I get distracted by that
kind of stuff. But these canvases-I guess—where so similar that
assembling them only pointed out their differences – like painting just
the fender and it doesnıt quite match.
I like art to really make me think about stuff and I kept
looking for – begging for -- some content in these very minimalist works
and yet I walked out happy feeling like I got it, even though I can say why. I
liked the paintings although Iım still one of the first to quip, ³Painting is
dead.²
Terry Talty is the self-described art tourist, who writes
contemporary art criticism in a postmodern world where anything could be good.