Analia Saban
When the sponge has become wishy-washy, the headboard stern, and a broken sink makes you cry, it’s likely that your domestic objects have wandered onto the slippery stage known as transference. Seeing one’s self in things – as Analia Saban knows – is not just a symptom of semantic saturation (or insanity); it also encompasses the benign, rather ho-hum mental somersaults that enable us to get through the day. With her domestic-themed paintings of rubbish bags and bed sheets, Saban has taken to heart another Freudian catch-22: it’s precisely because certain objects are so proximate, so seemingly sacrosanct, that they’re liable to turn their backs on us. What is closest is most privy to estrangement.
Hence the pathos exacted by the quiet negation – and passive-aggression – present in the Argentinian-born LA-based artist’s show of five paintings and one installation, ‘Bathroom Sink, Etc.’. In Claim (From a Curtain) (all works 2012), a piece of mud-coloured linen hung over one of the gallery’s three windows, then draped itself onto the adjoining wall, where it was pulled taut over a canvas before finally collapsing on the gallery floor. The canvas echoed the closed-off window in a gesture that was both quiet and mean, since it intended to seal off tabular imagery. Despite the exhibition’s title, the show contained no likeness of a bathroom sink, which added irony to the strategically blasé ‘etc.’ (as if ‘bathroom sink’ offered any real specificity). Bathroom Sink is a painting of muted earth tones: a hole has been cut out of a slab of abrasive quartzite, which Saban placed on an equal-sized canvas, viewable through the sink-sized removed area, like an appliance waiting to be installed. But the size and vertical orientation of the removed oval strangely recall a classical portrait, making the work a sort of character study without a character. Since the viewer reads this – and one’s self – into a nearly blank surface, the work sets the stage for a state of pleasantly befuddled projection.
‘Or am I just making all this up?’ the analysand asks his analyst, who stares back impassively, offering a noncommittal shrug. In Saban’s blank, stripped and hostile-feeling canvases, it’s hard to distinguish real seeing from duplicitous seeming. To view these works is to fumble for keys through a state of semi-conscious darkness. This was further compounded by the illusionism in Trash Bag With Knot and Stretched Fitted Bed Sheet With Hole. The former looked like a wrinkly plastic bag engulfing a canvas that rested against a wall – but it was actually acrylic, piled on layer by layer. More interesting than this technical feat was the play of associations and queries it provoked: why is that ‘art work’ placed demeaningly inside a rubbish bag? And since the ‘knot’ looks more like a bow, is the art/trash also a kind of gift? Saban punctured the flowing, architectural bravado of artfully crinkled ‘plastic’ to expose a corner of the meek canvas, engulfed in a mock-heroic battle with its shroud-like silencer.
The pieces that spoke the loudest – like Claim and Discharge – were those that offered up double entendres. To ‘claim’, of course, means to assert or colonize, but also to cause the loss of; hence the piece both cancels out imagery (in sealing off both a window and a canvas), but also stakes its own ground (the piece is physically expansive, even dramatic). We intuit ‘discharge’ from the speck of white acrylic resting on the belly of a disgorged canvas (packed with more acrylic); in its distension, the work seemed weighty, physically pregnant. Freud himself might appreciate the symmetry between the fleck (a semi-fertile emission) and the canvas’s fertile bloating. To the semiologist, however, there’s the same parity: to discharge is to emit – that is, to generate – but also to reject or dismiss. Of course, these strings of associations are half mine, not Saban’s: they are the mental traps such works trick you into entering. And even if the pieces themselves agreed with you, their cold shoulders would never outwardly admit it.
