Saskia Fleishman, “Scattered Light”

By John Zotos

Galleri Urbane, Dallas, Texas

Exhibition continues through June 15, 2024

May 18, 2024

Saskia Fleishman, “Chincoteague (August 2023 IV),” 2023, 48 x 36”

The history of landscape painting is as varied as it is long, and occupies a formidable place in what’s considered a traditional genre within the art historical canon. Specifically, in Western art it has served various purposes over the centuries where it may have simply depicted the beauty of nature, created a background space for figures engaged in both sacred and secular activities, or directly attested to the wealth and power of a patron whose portrait was identified with the land and property depicted in the picture. In “Scattered Light,” Saskia Fleishman’s newest body of work, landscapes are released from those traditional purposes. In her hands the subject metaphorically takes on the ephemeral, perpetual, and mysterious nature of our existence.   

Saskia Fleishman, “Cape Elizabeth (July 2018),” 2018, acrylic and sand on chiffon canvas, 48 x 60”

Her process begins with photographs of the sky and terrain of a particular place related to her family or personal travels. In this exhibition, the paintings are derived from images shot at Cape Elizabeth, Sedona, Chincoteague (located on Virginia’s eastern shore), Joshua Tree, and others. Her interest in natural optical phenomena explains the title of the exhibition; “scattered light” occurs when light rays interact with particles in the atmosphere like dust, vapor, water, or smoke. As a result of that interaction, the pathway of the particles changes direction, resulting in rays of light that stimulate new visual sensations. Fleishman’s goal is to capture these effects with her camera. They form the basis for her paintings, which start with a chiffon substrate on which a particular photograph is digitally printed.

Saskia Fleishman, “Sheridan (June 2021),” 2021, 31 x 39”

The artist mixes her paint with sand collected from each particular place. This gives each work its characteristic texture while also registering as a symbolic physical trace that ties each painting to its geographical point of origin. These landscapes are abstracted from reality, capturing a fleeting essence and the play of light from a singular moment. Her process includes taping off the portions of the chiffon image that are left visible in the finished product, while the other portions are painstakingly painted by hand in vibrant color schemes that evoke the original location. A tension-driven binary is established such that the sections with paint come forward and the chiffon on which the photograph is printed recedes into the distance as a blurry trace image. 

Saskia Fleishman, “Sedona (December 2019),” 2019, 40 x 40”

In the compelling “Cape Elizabeth (July 2018)” Fleishman channels the modernist grid on a large scale. Painted sections with ochre, yellow, and gray clouds cascade across the picture plane above the cape, bisecting the seven sections of chiffon substrate that read like vertical columns or Barnett Newman zips. Here, perhaps a scene at dusk, the play of light above mountains in the distance, and the open sky above, are amplified as perceptual marvels activated by the contrasting colors and materials.  

Two paintings arranged as a diptych, “Sheridan (May 2021) and Sheridan (May 2021 II),” each feature four chiffon sections that seem to converge toward the center where the panels fail to meet. Read from the center, they radiate outwards to the far edges of each image. Such energetic dynamism underscores the raw power of nature. 

Saskia Fleishman, “Tongue River Canyon (October 2022),” 2022, 27 x 47”

Another painting activated by the viewer’s motion, “Sedona (December 2019)” uses a tondo format customarily associated with the Renaissance, which in turn refers to sacred art. Blue skies punctuated with clouds float above the green terrain below with its rows of tilled soil. From the center, blimp-shaped sections of the chiffon project outwards to the edges of the circular shape, such that it takes on the semblance of a mandala, underscoring that this is a spiritual as well as a physical space. A sense of energetic motion undeniably converges toward a central vanishing point, and concomitantly expands outwards beyond the perimeter toward the viewer. This mirrors celestial mechanics, in which contraction and expansion are definitive cosmological properties.

This body of work complicates the customary purposes that landscape painting has been set to. In so doing, Fleishman has reactivated a mode of representation often prone to overly familiar formulas.

John Zotos is an art critic and essayist based in Dallas.