The Brooklyn Rail

Raymond Saunders’s paintings and assemblages mimic a neglected alley wall festooned with old wheat-paste posters, spray paint, and warning signs now defanged by disfigurement. Saunders’s real goal seems to be the imitation of those unexpected confluences of random signs that present a symbolic or prophetic reading or message. Crosses abound, mostly fabricated by right-angled intersections of colored tape, as in Dr. Jesus (1968), I Don’t Go To Church Anymore (1975), and Harlem (1979), or suggested through the coincidental patterning of a nine-square black-and-white checkered canvas in Used to Be and Now? (2001) or the intersection of a yard stick and an expanse of tape in El Telegrafo (1986). There are also quite a few Virgin Marys and sundry saints, as in Untitled (1987), Flowers from a Black Garden no. 51 (1993), and Untitled (1994). Saunders also includes more personal heroes such as Malcolm X, Ingres, Dürer, and Thelonious Monk, but it is the spiritual imagery that positions his works within a prophetic context—these are not to be confused with the accumulated images of a Rauschenberg or Basquiat. There is also the symbolism of reading signs and symbols in a didactic format—much is made in the wall text (the exhibition was curated by Ebony L. Haynes) of the artist’s tenure as a school teacher in New York, and of the notion that the black canvas is among other things a blackboard. But the blackboard metaphor goes only so far: through Saunders’s lyrical use of texture the black canvases become brick walls, Paleolithic cave walls, or even the anti-art of Stella’s “Black Paintings.”

Post No Bills is an extensive survey of thirty-seven paintings over two capacious gallery spaces. Saunders is a consistent painter and the works read like a collection of themes and variations, drawing the viewer into the nuance of the painter’s thinking rather than attempting to dazzle us with variety. Several of the walls in both spaces are laminated floor-to-ceiling with enlargements of the artist’s textures on vinyl. It’s already easy enough to get lost in the swirling topologies of Saunders’s thick brushstrokes, mostly originating in the matte black acrylic paint which forms the base of almost all of his compositions. This foundation ripples beneath tattered paper appliqués including drawings by the artist’s former students, concert posters, and other adverts. In two works—They’re Not All Like That (1995) and Untitled (1995)— he uses old doors as canvasses, a device that does bring Saunders into conversation with Rauschenberg’s modified readymades. But by and large, the surface is defined by pure paint: sometimes the painter will layer a different color over an impasto-ed stroke, rendering it an impossible two-pigment mark with a crisp straight edge marking the boundary between colors. In Untitled (1990), Saunders seemingly names his process, inscribing in bright white chalk the words “watering a black garden” on a black canvas with a few chalk constellations. And in two contrasting pieces he merrily puns on his school-marm-ish chalkboard analogy: in Flowers from a Black Garden no. 51 (1993), he has adhered a small old-timey student’s blackboard to the canvas, while in Untitled (1995), he creates a faux blackboard rectangle. The metaphor can be taken or left, it’s up to you.

Amongst the not-so-random accumulations of imagery, sacred and profane, neatly drawn vignettes emerge in thin chalk lines, similar in consistency to a spider’s silky strands. Saunders sticks to a certain repertoire: flowers, water kettles, jars, odd orbs, and hemispherical doodads. The meaning of the drawings is ambiguous, and the artist enjoys toying with our interpretations. In Walls I Have Known II (1983) The artist pastes a scrap of chalk to the surface, again punning—it isn’t teachers chalk, but Conte crayon, signifying the hierarchy of teaching and art-making. On many of the pieces in Post No Bills, images from other artists are placed, and they resonate with the cob-web like sketches: a pair of works facing each other, both titled Untitled (1998) are quiet tributes to great artists, one sporting a drawing of Adam and Eve by Dürer and the other a portrait of Paganini by Ingres. While the Dürer is accompanied by a spatula shaped blob of rusty orange and the Ingres by a jar and what appears to be a plate of candied apples, the insinuation is that the impetus to sketch is organic and transitive—it can happen anywhere under any context. There is a lovely literal nod to Arman: three squeezed out paint tubes, in Saturdays of Black Color and Habitual Gestures (1987). Perhaps more poignant than any of Saunders’s taped or implied crosses is the dialogue between a print of a Breughel painting of tulips and other blooms and Saunders’s delicate chalk sketch of tulips to the right of the laminated poster in Passages: East, West 1 (1987). Unlike the many prophetic signifiers populating the artist’s canvases in the galleries of both Andrew Kreps and David Zwirner, here the image seems to be learning from itself, an odd little self-portrait that emerges between the endless thud of messages barraging us from outside.