((Sacha Zabotin lives and works between Brooklyn, NY and Corsica))

I am inspired by memory – more specifically the energy and feelings that stick with you well after the experiences that produced those feelings and energy have passed.  I am inspired by impressions and subtle traces after meeting someone you really get along with, or the way someone can die and still influence you just as much if not more than the living.  I am inspired by friendship and love and the space where the invisible part of the human experience happens.   I am inspired by impermanence, and the wicked force we have and feel in this world that defies it despite its matter of factness.  Hence my central thought in this pursuit: Defying Impermanence.

I paint to shine light on the sometimes simple but at the same time revolutionary suchness of life.  There’s a significant amount of resilience to painting this – events and connections that have been made in life exist in perpetuity in this space regardless of our recollection or erasure of them.  There’s a powerful truth and reconciliation to it too.  No stone gets left unturned – the fact of experience is stored no matter how we talk about it or don’t.  There’s no running away from it.  No individual, group, or country can manipulate these facts in this space.  

I paint little bits and pieces of this emotional/spiritual storage space, as well as windows into it, and finally vehicles that permit access to this space like the Rolodex, be it from a personal, group, community, or national level.  I start many of these paintings with a poem or letter written in charcoal, and then abstract or destroy it, to represent in a very real way the importance of a stored message existing in space despite its disappearance. 

May this spatial representation empower disenfranchised individuals and communities and allow space for resolution. May it also be a constant and recurring validation of our shared experience.

Process:

For the most recent series, Rolodex, I focus primarily on form.  I draw the figure out in charcoal, which then informs the way the rest of the painting comes along.  These vehicles contain different information, so I decide how to best represent it within the pages turning on the axis.  The first painting in the series is a representation of a vision I had of this object in deep space - in the night sky, amongst the stars.  I chose to keep the whole Rolodex in charcoal – a material I’ve used in many other series because of its poetic impermanence, fragility, and huge potential to be manipulated and transformed.  Despite the power of the object, floating peacefully on a dark black matte background, a few drops of water would drastically change it, and a bucket would make it disappear back into the night sky, very much as it was experienced.  The rest of the series contains objects in their ideal state as well as very much representative of personal and national spiritual and emotional reckonings.  For example, I pictured what an American (United States) or French reckoning would look like, and represented that simply by alternating red and white in the Rolodex’s papers, with a dark blue background.  There’s a truth to this national history, represented by the blood like sections in red but also a potential for truth, reconciliation and growth represented by the textured white.  Recently, I’ve been exploring the negative space of this object.  So I take most of the form’s lines and stretch them out across the canvas, going for a spiritually charged stained glass feel.


In another series, Indifferent Tide, I start the process with charcoal as well.  I write a poem, a letter to a friend, an ode to someone or something dear to me, and then abstract it, with a large brush and water.  I then add swatches of color to this abstracted smoky background, by applying paint and then removing it with a palette knife – just as we experience something and it fades.  Most of that experience is removed, no longer present, but a small bit of it sticks.  I continue this meditation on fullness and emptiness until a pattern emerges.  In some case I’ll paint the lines I have to paint around some of the most striking shapes within the pattern.  Eventually, I pick out sections, or windows rather, to keep and cover up the rest of the painting in a white that becomes dynamic and textured as it picks up the first layer of charcoal and streaks it along with it.  Finally, as a sort of affront to the impossibility to accurately define the complexity of a coastline for example, I spray paint arbitrary lines around these windows – in some ways representing the limits around the information in life we have or don’t have access to.  We’ll have little clues, bits and pieces representing the whole in this life, but so much is left undiscovered.  I paint this beautiful part of life here in this series, our collective epistemological challenge and pursuit.       

I paint the MRF series in search of so called "Memory Retention Fields", and the result is what I like to think this "full" space looks like, as if everything were permanent.  Even if we forget, or even if particular events weren't witnessed at all, they are still stored somewhere and have meaning.  Like the question of if a tree really falls if no one hears it... the answer in this series is yes.  The arcs, loops, lines that you see here are like past stories subtly /resiliently whizzing through space (connecting people, places, things, events, etc) - despite no longer having "concrete" forms in the present.  

I demonstrate this feeling/idea in the process.  The streaks of color you see are applied first, then completely covered such that none of them can be seen.  Just a mix of whatever the colors blend into + multiple distracting layers.  Then I remove all of the paint on the surface of the canvas - scrape it clean.  Funnily enough, even if the initial streaks were blended/painted over/"forgotten", when all is removed they come to the foreground and everything that covered them fade into the background.  In other words when the complexity of the present is removed, the past is revealed (in colorful and acrobatic gestures), all on the same canvas.  I like to think of them as resilient historical abstractions.

The Al’z Timers series represents the theory of the MRF paintings in practice.  They are less stretched out over time and more in the moment and nuanced.  First I write out phrases/ sentences/ letters/ poems/ along with occasional figurative drawings – all in charcoal.  Then I abstract all of these scriptures into a smoky monochrome background layer.  This layer is further abstracted with more and more swatches of color and form until the last “structural” lines are applied to hold everything together – like a pattern.  Despite the abstractions and build-up of layers, the original charcoal scriptures are stored at the canvas’s surface level.  They live there and have meaning, regardless of their apparent impermanence. 

For inquiries, please contact zabotinart@gmail.com.