Flash Art uses cookies strictly necessary for the proper functioning of the website, for its legitimate interest to enhance your online experience and to enable or facilitate communication by electronic means. To learn more about cookies please see Terms & conditions

Flash Art
Flash Art
Shop
  • Home
    • CURRENT ISSUE
  • Features
    • Conversations
    • Reviews
    • Report
    • On View
    • FLASH FEED
    • Audacious Advice
    • Dance Office
    • Listening In
    • The Uncanny Valley
    • Flashback
    • (In)Visible Hands
    • PARADIGME
  • STUDIOS
    • Dune
    • Flash Art Mono
  • Archive
    • DIGITAL EDITION
    • Shop
    • Subscription
    • INSTITUTIONAL SUBSCRIPTION
    • Contact
→
Flash Art

330 April-May 2020, Reviews

21 May 2020, 10:00 am CET

Sean Landers The Consortium Museum / Dijon by Sarah Moroz

by Sarah Moroz May 21, 2020
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Exhibition view at The Consortium Museum, Dijon, 2020. Courtesy of The Consortium Museum, Dijon.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Exhibition view at The Consortium Museum, Dijon, 2020. Courtesy of The Consortium Museum, Dijon.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Exhibition view at The Consortium Museum, Dijon, 2020. Courtesy of The Consortium Museum, Dijon.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Captain Homer (Seven Pipes for Seven Seas), 2016. Oil on linen. 48 × 41 in. Eric Decelle collection, Brussels. Photography by Christopher Burke. Courtesy the artist and Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Maroon Bells (Deer), 2015. Oil on linen. 82 × 62 in. Private collection, Belgique. Photography by Christopher Burke. Courtesy the artist and Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, 2015. Oil on linen. 60 × 78 in. Eric Decelle collection, Brussels. Photography by Christopher Burke. Courtesy the artist and Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Plankboy (Daedalus), 2019. Oil on canvas. 43 × 59 in. Photography by Christopher Burke. Courtesy the artist and Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Both Things at Once, 2018. Oil on linen. 59 × 77 in. Photography by Christopher Burke. Courtesy the artist and Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels.

Sean Landers’s scrawl is the way into his peppery worldview: his forty-painting retrospective at Le Consortium often doubles as a reading exercise. The American artist takes notebook-style confessions but narrates them outside of their private confines. A critic once described his work as “performances posing as crises, balanced between self-knowledge and self-doubt,” while curator Eric Troncy likens Landers’s self-conscious expression — a kind of verbose interiority laid bare — to the stylization of social media. Sometimes his writing is circular, almost singsong (“When freedom becomes the cage / When the cage becomes freedom”). Other times it’s plaintive and makes the viewer flinch in recognition of shared burdens (“the saving grace is that the alternative is much more grim”) or in distaste for the lament of the put-upon white male artist (he cops to his self-deprecation being strategic).
Landers often imposes a visually systematic way to express the tumult of his thinking. Canvases riddled with wooden signposts, the kind encountered on a hiking trail, fill the first two rooms. Yet, like some ontological Choose Your Own Adventure, these markers highlight directionlessness rather than direction. “I’m trying / to make life’s / inherent sadness funny / but it’s barely funny / in the end,” he muses across multiple signs in his 2019 work At Least We Have Wine. Elsewhere, grievances are featured on slender, knobby birch trees in eerie dark woods. Scarred with inscriptions, the trunks exhume Landers’s insecurities and posturing, like his inscribed ratio “80% dummy 20% genius” in the 2015 work Joke? Joke! Joke. Painted bibliothèques of ordered vertical and horizontal spines spell out his thoughts in lieu of titles. By contrast, his 1993 work Patches showcases his frenetic thinking in a more ambient, free-associative manner and on a bigger scale, using black text against a plain white backdrop (sprinkled with references to Olivia Newton John, Rudy Giuliani, and Eurydice). Without a systematic structure, the viewer’s eye scatters, though the work aptly reflects the inner tangle of levity and misery.
The exhibition concludes with Landers’s “Plankboy” series, an odd character with emoji-like expressions who emulates the gestures of Narcissus and Sisyphus. Here, Greek mythology speaks of misfortune in place of the artist. “Art is little solace,” he writes on a birch tree, “but it is solace.”

Share this article
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Mail
More stories by

Sarah Moroz

Invulnerable Vulnerabilities: Life and Art in the Time of the Virus

20 April 2020, 1:00 pm CET

Nathaniel Mellors: We should talk about some of your work and the exhibition you’re working on for the museum. Tala…

Read More

Jana Euler: Contextual Painting in Times of Global Groundlessness

27 April 2020, 1:00 pm CET

As much as an apt consideration about painting today would have been a welcome opening, there is an elephant in…

Read More

Emily Mae Smith: A Broom of One’s Own

18 May 2020, 1:00 pm CET

Fresh, febrile, shot through with humor and glamour, the paintings of Emily Mae Smith are reliquaries of art history and…

Read More

Maison Margiela Artisanal Apparel – Photography by Rudi Williams

22 May 2020, 12:00 pm CET

NewCostume is a column by Matthew Linde exploring contemporary fashion practice. Episode I: a visual essay by photographer Rudi Williams…

Read More

  • Next

    Donald Judd “Judd” MoMA — Museum of Modern Art / New York

  • Previous

    “MECARÕ. Amazonia in the Petitgas Collection” MO.CO. Montpellier Contemporain

© 2023 Flash Art

  • Terms & conditions
  • Contact
  • Work with Us