Analia Saban

For “Gag,” Analia Saban’s New York solo debut, the Argentinean artist has cast items from her studio—a sheet, a towel, and a toilet brush, among others—in acrylic. Each object has been hung or draped from raw canvases, creating a collection of three-dimensional works that could be described as “acrylic on canvas,” though many look far more like sculptures than paintings. Noticeably, the towel is immaculately white with the exception of a single brown stain, the sheet is frayed and torn, and the bristles of the toilet brush are slightly crumpled; each defect brings to mind moments that are private, not typically meant for public view. These are troubling, psychologically thrilling works that get at the crux of anxieties about the traces bodies leave and the ways in which they expose us.

Saban has spent the past seven-some years exploring the capacities of painting, playfully toying with the medium’s history—for example, filling canvas bags with gallons of acrylic, creating works pregnant with paint. The pieces here are markedly different: nuanced, sophisticated, and darkly studied, bound by calm monochromatic colors—mostly beiges and cool whites—while possessing a quiet violence. In Concrete Gag (all works 2012), a slab of cement has been slapped over a raw canvas, smothering its surface. See, too, Trough, (flesh), an especially stunning work consisting of a canvas cast in acrylic that Saban has dramatically gessoed; the work measures some five feet three inches across, which is the artist’s own height. At the bottom is a narrow canal into which she has poured 110 pounds, her own body weight, of ruddy brown paint. It looks like a swamp of wet mud and could take years to dry. Instead of interrogating the medium itself, Saban has here used her imaginative techniques to create a tremendously human—and beautiful—body of work that teeters as much on the painting/sculpture divide as it does on the line between what is public and what is personal, calling attention to how quickly these boundaries are drawn.