Analia Saban at Sprüth Magers

Analia Saban, Draped Concrete (2016) (detail). Four concrete slabs on wooden sawhorse, 41.25 x 192 x 16.8 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers.

Analia Saban’s exhibition, Folds and Faults at Sprüth Magers Los Angeles, features all the theatrics of an artist undertaking experiments of material intelligence. Saban undoubtedly has a command of materials—her determination to untether medium from substrate, or medium from anticipated form, is something we have come to expect from her practice. Her repertoire, which formerly focused exclusively on painting, has expanded to include ink, marble, concrete, photographs, laser cutting, and weaving as areas of investigation.

The echoes of a silent but dramatic crack ring in the hall of the gallery. Gate-keeping concrete slabs—doubled back onto themselves—greet you upon entering. The crumbled creases of the Folded Concrete works—Spiral Fold, Accordion Fold, and Gate Fold (2017)—are somehow onomatopoetic. Their forms are uneasy: smooth, calm planes of concrete find themselves wrenched, twisted, and ostensibly broken. Their titles reveal processes of which might otherwise be identical or unidentifiable to onlookers. The works, both monumental and impotent, faintly recall Donald Judd’s Marfa monuments but here find themselves collapsed, deflated, folded, foiled.

Saban’s suite of paintings, The Woven Solid… series (2017), plays with paint’s historical motivation: mimicry. Here, mimicry becomes physical: paint becomes thread. Strings of black and gray acrylic paint are woven into linen canvases. They wiggle by like impasto-ed brushstrokes, and paunch forth, all bulbous and bodily, through the warp or weft of the linen. As truly tensile structures, these works are seemingly on the brink of unraveling at any moment. Further contemplation opens onto thoughts of stitches of acrylic like rogue pointillist stipples, unruly monochromes, antsy ben-day dots. These works manage to traverse centuries of representational techniques solely through abstract means. Saban’s recent paintings chide a refrain that doubles as a conceptual prompt: What is a painting that is not just a surface treatment?

Beyond these two series, the steam of her experiments wane. Upstairs, Draped Concrete (2016) hangs like a redux of previous works done in rich marble slabs. The marble’s reluctant drape over bespoke sawhorses were a part of the joy of these earlier works; in one gesture they managed to gossip about the long history of drapery in sculpture. By contrast, Draped Concrete reads as idiomatic and far less incisive.

Saban’s Pleated Ink (2017) works show off more material discoveries—thick letterpress ink, heavily poured, is left to dry and shrivel up in brain-like folds. Laser-cut images are carved into heavy paper stock that is then mounted on the thickened slab of ink. The images rendered into the paper, with their incredible precision and legibility, overpower the delicate and sumptuous folds of ink that are themselves exquisite enough. While the ink-on-paper inversion is clever, and the ingenuity of the process is impressive, these pieces lack the raw, experimental glow of the aforementioned works.

The exhibition concludes with Saban’s Threadbare (16 Steps) (2017). Threadbare consists of 16 richly detailed photographs of a swath of linen being systematically broken down from fabric to fiber. Watching the invitation of chaos progress through the work is strangely riveting in the driest way. The documented disorder recalls Robert Smithson’s writings on entropy or Robert Morris’ Scatter Pieces from the late 1960s. And the images themselves are printed so exceptionally that at a glance the frames look to be filled with linen rather than depictions of it. But the trompe l’oeil goes further! Saban printed the photographs, not on paper, but on sheets made up of layers and layers of white acrylic paint. Threadbare tells a story Saban has enacted many times before: When Paint Becomes Substrate.

The strength of Saban’s practice lies in abstraction through disjunction. The esoteric pleasure of her work is in her new conception of traditional mediums. Her practice is a play not just with paint or marble or ink, but with the history of art. For better or for worse, without rigorous contemplation of Western art history’s narratives of painting and sculpture, it is difficult to gain much conceptual traction with Folds and Faults. Nevertheless, Saban’s handling of material makes each work feel like an exciting, new discovery, despite her use of centuries-old material.

This review was originally published in Carla issue 9.

Analia Saban, Pleated Ink, Staircase with Landing (2017). Laser-sculpted paper on ink on wood panel, 64 x 48 x 2.1 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers.

Analia Saban, Draped Concrete (2016) (detail). Four concrete slabs on wooden sawhorse, 41.25 x 192 x 16.8 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers.