Seraphin Gallery, Philadelphia, PA
February 24 – March 25, 2012
By Todd Keyser
Rebecca Saylor Sack’s solo exhibition, Albatross, features six impressively large abstract paintings in Seraphin Gallery’s front space. Sack is a Philadelphia-based painter who teaches at the University of the Arts. Her paintings have a brooding, churning, Baroque sensibility, enhanced by intense fracturing of circular, oval-like brushstrokes that give way to small and large calligraphic squiggles stretching across the surface.
As the title of the exhibition suggests, Sack’s paintings take us on a voyage into a dangerous mixer of land, water, and air, tossed about and applied effortlessly through her paint handling. In the poetic writings of Shelly and Coleridge, the albatross is a seafaring bird that denotes good or bad luck. The process of making a painting too, can go either way: very well or very badly. The theme of the exhibition underscores Sack’s process as much as the paintings on view.
Todd Keyser is a Philadelphia-based artist. Keyser received his MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art.