Artist: Sarah Walker

Sarah Walker's paintings, now showing at PIEROGI gallery in Brooklyn, are a mind bender. You don't simply see her paintings, you enter them. They seem like a vision of what the eyes sees before it registers what it is. Her images, though abstract, seem familiar. I can look at one and think that I see a cabin in a woods, the sky between the trees, an ethernet, a web. But the image she has created is more complex than that, more puzzling, more advanced than a simple representation of a thing.

Her technique is a series of layering, overlapping, deleting, rubbing and revealing. There is a sense of archival to her paintings, which you understand when you peer up close (which you must do, and are compelled to do). It's like some areas of paint are preserved on purpose, while others are deleted in an attempt to unveil their residue below. You can like one painting more than another, with no real ability to discern why. You can be drawn to one, and unaffected by another, yet the content is the same. Colors can be deceiving, shapes can transform before you.

The canvases in the gallery are embraced by simple white planks of wood nailed into the walls. It is all white, save for her work. It is simple vs. chaos. There is order, and there is nothing.

Pierogi website
Sarah Walker website