The Brooklyn Rail

Stately, totemic, physical: Peter Sacks’s densely layered paintings exalt in juxtapositions of texture and form, chaos and cohesion. Five monumental works announce the exhibition, towering over ten feet high on both sides of its first gallery. Like poems or chains, each painting is built from the joining of any number of units; in this case, 10-by-10-inch birch blocks that lend a Tetris-like quality to the irregularly shaped wall pieces. The largest work, Outcome (2023), comprises ninety-seven blocks, while smaller works are built from only two. (Not all works consist of a prime number of blocks.)

On each block, Sacks employs a mode of building that is recognizably his own, repurposing scavenged objects by blanketing them over his support and fixing them with archival glue. Through this process, layers of domestic and industrial detritus ranging from the familiar to the nostalgic—hand-crocheted doilies, costume jewelry, kitchen utensils, sneakers, padlocks, electrical outlets window frames—maintain degrees of legibility in high-relief, saturated excess. (Save for a crumpled soda can in Spirit Marker 2 (2023), conventional garbage rarely makes itself known.) In no particular order and not always all together, fragments are then soaked, burned, and painted over.

The resulting compositions are a feat of engineering. Sacks suspends hammers and license plates amidst, betwixt, and atop burlap and broadcloth, netting and embroidery, wires and cords. Thick with intertwined material social objects, they resemble circuit boards pieced together from the abandoned contents of a mariner’s garage.

Coloration in these works is austere, with a surface layer of dark paint blanketing the brambled folds of objects. Though daubs of orange, green, and red paint are discernible, only four works actively employ color: three green (Fuse [2023], Go-Between 3 [2024], and Go-Between 7 [2024]) and the other—Wake (2022), the only work tied to semi-representation, in that its surface is shallow, with arcs of frayed white fabric winding between scallop shells, resembling seafoam rivulets on a sandbank—is blue. The rest present as gray-black behemoths. A certain ashy patina is lent by contours of powdery white paint, which strikes particularly high relief against the swaths of surface area that seem all but shrink-wrapped in lace. The effect is nearly topographic, as if Sacks has dragged his paintings across a dusty floor.

Although darker, tighter, and more full-figured than much of Sacks’s previous work, objects with familiar through-lines of the artist’s practice still emerge: typewritten poetics on a barely-there white linen fragment of Go-Between 13 (2024), the steady gaze of anti-apartheid activist and friend Steve Biko in Retrieval (2022), remnants of garment edges like collars, hems, and plackets. Similarly the works are decidedly neither abstract nor representational, hewing to a material-based self-evidence that has been Sacks’s mode of visual operation for the last twenty years.

In Spirit Marker 1 (2023), two cheese graters seem locked in dialogue, their pocked silver faces finding visual play with the moiré patterns of painted burlap and pleats; the hard, shiny coldness of scissors, pliers, drill bits, and a hammer; and an unrelenting morse code of zippers and buttons. Nearby a whole plastic model of a nineteenth century ship is lodged in the composition, its permanently billowing sails inert against crocheted lace. Other associations verge on levity. In No Harvest (2023–24), a driftwood log wearing headphones playfully subverts expectations, a glimpse of lightness amidst the literal weight of the composition.

Sacks’s exhibition is an unboastful study in gestalt, inviting viewers to discern the compositional continuities and visual echoes that lie beneath his work’s anti-entropic surfaces. Masterful compositional arrangements oscillate between silence and expression, inviting contemplation of the tension between what is visible and what is obscured within and beyond any given plane. At the same time these works persist in withholding notions of comprehensive revelation. So much lies beneath their skin, and sheer scale is employed to keep elements just out of visual reach—like glass jars on a shelf six inches too high, which outstretched fingertips can only turn.

Whether through the juxtaposition of heavy and light elements, subtle mirroring of objects, or revelation of unexpected depths, these works reward close looking with underlying unity and intrigue. When renewed gaze dare question whether more remains undiscovered, Sacks limns back an effortless, persistent yes.