SAN FRANCISCO
Sabina Sulé at Micaela Gallery

“Palimpsest” is the art-historical term for parchment manuscripts that have been scraped down and overwritten, their earlier meanings still partially visible beneath the topmost layer of text. During Abstract Expressionism’s heyday, the word was applied to rough-hewn artworks that exposed traces of the artist’s creative struggle, like overturned chairs. With today’s antiheroic postmodernist aesthetic, the term has taken on a broader, philosophical sense: creations reflect their history and circumstances, if examined critically, and so do their creators, likewise shaped by external agents—e.g., other artists.

The abstract lyrical paintings of Sabina Sulé have been likened to palimpsests because their transparent visual depths reveal marks of the artist’s hand, but the interpretation of artist-as-cultural-creation pertains as well. Born in Baku, Azerbaijan, and trained as an artist and stage designer in the old Soviet system, Sulé’s interest in traditional realism continued during graduate studies in San Francisco after her 1999 immigration. Contemporary art, however, altered her outlook and painting process toward conceptually inflected abstraction. She now makes preliminary charcoal drawings on canvas of friends and models, as accurate as ever. Then she overlays them with washes of transparent acrylic, choosing the colors subjectively, from the environment, rather than from the motif; she thus unites figure and “ground,” self and world, conceptually rather than naturalistically. She repeats the line-then-wash process, occasionally sanding and erasing, until the canvas is filled. The drawings gradually lose their representational meaning and become abstract elements that suggest further simplification and reduction. Sulé adds large, central, opaque blocks of color that sweep away the extraneous elements and give shape and focus to the remnants at the margins; they’re like Jules Olitski’s airbrushed “skies” contained by “horizons” at the canvases’ edges.

Sulé’s strong negative spaces are usually hard-edged and flatly painted, but sometimes they take on a torn-paper organic quality, especially when translucent, when they invoke light, water and foliage. Sometimes, as in Amalgamation, they resemble placid lakes or rivers spanned by thin bridges or causeways. In other works the map metaphor yields to geometrized landscape (Ernst, Feininger) or poeticized flora (O’Keeffe, Frankenthaler).