BIOGRAPHY

Saul Chernick (BFA, RISD & MFA, Rutgers) has exhibited in numerous galleries, museums, and cultural institutions including the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, the Bronx Museum of Art, the Jewish Museum, the Lower East Side Printshop, Rush Arts Gallery, Senior & Shopmaker Gallery. He has had solo exhibitions at Soloway Gallery, Max Protech Gallery, Franklin Art Works, La Montagne Gallery, and NURTUREart. He lives in Kingston, New York.

ARTIST STATEMENT (Sculpture)

Objects that are capable of signaling both the ancient and the futuristic, possess a disorienting power. At their best, they invite us to into the unconstrained headspace of sci-fi and fantasy. I want to see sculptures that remind us that the spirit world is all around us and that curiosity and play are essential to living. An intuitive voice calls me to make objects to serve this purpose. It directs me to fashion materials to exacting, sometimes beguiling specifications – this is also a form of play.

Some pieces begin with a utilitarian object, either found or purchased, and adorned with intricate patterns until it becomes purely ceremonial. Other pieces are invented deities that assume zoomorphic and abstracted forms. All the pieces are made with a homemade sculpting compound that acts like a skin. It’s stone-like surface, with colors baked in, shares affinities with several age-old crafting traditions including ceramics, masonry, tilework, and inlay.

 I make work that responds to the sensibilities of children because in childhood, play and learning are one and the same. Play is a mode of communication, a medium for social connection, a means to explore, release and envision possibilities.

ARTIST STATEMENT (Panels)

In the summer of 2024, I began collaging pieces of thick felt on painted wood panels. I was seeking ways to create, iterate, and process ideas more quickly than my sculpture work would allow.

At first glance, the panels can pass for paintings, and part of me was tempted to call them that, just to keep things simple. However, the forms are not rendered in paint, they are shapes crafted from of physical materials. This key difference enables them to communicate across two “frequencies”. The first frequency is graphic; the way the image is experienced as shape and color.  The second, is tactility, a buzzing presence generated from the specific properties of the materials themselves. Thin shadows, cast by the low-relief forms, sharpen the images, linking the two frequencies in harmonious union. I begin with black and white marker drawings and think of the panels as sculptural interpretations.   

Using varied materials to fashion a glyph, design, image or pattern is nothing new, examples include hieroglyphs, mosaics, stained glass, textiles, and so much more. The human desire to view and create objects that communicate across these two frequencies is an ancient thing and I’m proud to make work that honors this continuum.

When producing these images, I often think about the mechanisms of the human body as well as architecture and machinery. These are things that have insides and outsides (and things on the inside are often in a state of flux, activity, and transformation). They have permeable and impermeable borders; they are containers, platforms, and foundations. They are precarious, in search of alignment, and perpetually falling in and out of balance.