Everlasting Ever Ever, Sean Gannon's first exhibition at Sorry We're Closed, carries with it the idea of cycle and repetition.

Each of his exhibitions can be seen as the narrative of a day, a form of day-to-day diary kept by the painter: I woke up, brushed my teeth, went out into the street and saw some bees, and then, in a store, I put my groceries in a plastic bag flanked by the pattern of the American flag, went home to pet Noodle, played the guitar and then went up on the roof to watch the sunset. The end.

Beneath this apparent simplicity lies a process that involves the construction and decomposition of several layers through the use of sanding and painting techniques designed to remove the hand from the work. To depict an almost industrial process when it is intimately artisanal. The result is a palpable sense of tension between the paintings' subjects and their sensual, minimalist surfaces.

Sean Gannon's wooden frames are handcrafted. Handcrafted from walnut, his specific work tells us about the transition from intellectual to manual labor.

Gannon notes that his work could be as much about toy design as Mondrian or vocoders, a synthesizer that produces sounds from speech analysis. And it is perhaps this analogy that best describes how Gannon's combination of subjective pictorial impulses with the constraints of a reductive process produces works imbued with personal intensity yet possessing an almost untraceable relationship with his first initial impulse.

A cyclical practice, then, that bites its own tail, playing on formal analogies between scattered subjects and artisanal techniques, works with figurative origins, evoking Sean Gannon's deep connection with a certain American folk art.

 

Emilie Pischedda