Sam Salisbury    Mar 1 - May 25, 2008

March 1 - May 25, 2008

Patricia Low Contemporary is pleased to present an exhibition by Sam Salisbury.

Flaunting a virtuosity of technique, Sam Salisbury’s canvases evoke a lineage with old master’s paintings: working in the traditional genres of portraiture and still-life, his timeless subjects are rendered with sublime classicism and formal etiquette. But all convention stops there, for Salisbury’s images are anything but decorous.

Posed with disarmingly casual airs, Salisbury’s women are contemporary muses, modern Gainsborough-esque debutantes or super-model goddesses. These are no natural beauties however, each figure is a composite, quite literally plucked and remixed from photo-shoot immortalisation. Approaching painting as a realm of post-illusion, Salisbury’s canvases defy critical propriety, striving not for representation, but rather pure virtuality. Salisbury uses his masterful processes to enhance the artificiality of his scenes, incorporating devices such as out-of-focus blurs, pantone-hued palette, Mills and Boon-like backdrops, and graphic-style illustration, all with the utmost subtlety. Eclipsing every media induced expectation, their consumptive fantasia becomes exceedingly (sur)real.

In Salisbury’s works the exquisitely beautiful transforms as the site for psychological estrangement; the subversion of perfection is what he does best. His still-life bouquets camouflage ever watchful ghostly eyes, while a two headed self-portrait serves up monstrosity, deadpan. Their uncanniness, however, isn’t from their depicted images but rather a sense of displaced media. Their unblemished photographic precision and montage compositions, when translated into paint, allude to a relentless surveillance. Compulsive, cloying, and disinterestedly fixated, Salisbury’s canvases proffer voyeurism for forensic scrutiny. The effect is space-age hypnotic: remote, disorientating, mesmerising to the core, a brand of future-painting that’s equally unnerving and irresistibly wondrous, conceived as pure and obsessively magnified beauty.