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.