The following essay was written by renowned art critic and curator Peter Frank and is published here with permission. Following the text, you can watch our studio visit conversation discussing the concepts and processes behind the work.

Painters have been making abstract paintings since the invention of the camera, if not before. Photographs give us the literal, allowing paintings to give us the sensation. Photography releases painting, and painters, from their indexical responsibility; if truth is to be imparted by a picture, that picture is the product of a shutter’s blink, or used to be. The digital age, of course, has given the lie to the camera’s once-unchallenged veracity. But painting as a result has only gained in credibility: the picture may not be real, but the paint is.

 

Robin Jack Sarner paints abstract sensations. She goes beyond the pictorial, not just the literal, in search of a way of seeing that invests her compositions with a conceptual, an emotional, even a spiritual substance. Sarner’s art concerns itself with the evocation of depth and atmosphere – as does any good landscape painting, but in Sarner’s case she renders landscape as a texture, a gesture, a dream and a dreamspace all enfolded in the deflective distortion of memory. The canvases Sarner paints in forceful, expansive strokes inherit their choreographies, and indeed their very appearance, from the Abstract Expressionist “theater of the brush.” Her scenarios in pigment reveal not the artist’s soul, however, but the lyricism of the poetry she sees all around her.

 

Engaging the term “choreographies” here indicates that Sarner’s painting displays qualities and conditions related as much to the human body as to landscape. This does not mean that she populates her spatial renderings with figural imagery; rather, it indicates that the accretions and eruptions of painterly gesture comprising her canvases – in particular her most recent – take on corporeal as well as, and at least occasionally instead of, atmospheric inference. Her billowing clouds of pigment are well-nigh as likely to describe the shifting contours of bodies in motion as they are the play of light and shadow across a sky-crowned field or forest. If in the aggregate it is the nuances of space, of atmosphere that stay with us, the hint of human form never quite disappears. Abstraction, as notion and as practice, allows, even encourages, such collapsing of identities and functions, encouraging a steadily maintained perceptual ambiguity.

 

Such ambiguity characterizes art produced nowadays in many media, old and new, across southern California, where Sarner now lives and works. In a very different manner it also characterizes the pictorial Gestaltung of Abstract Expressionism – a decidedly un-southern California phenomenon (as compared with its mid-century praxis in New York and San Francisco), certainly in historic terms. Sarner readily professes to the heritage: her work descends directly from that of Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Mark Rothko, and (in particular) Joan Mitchell, and their tumults and elisions of color and form recrudesce forcefully, and not accidentally, in Sarner’s art. But there is something optically and sensorily elusive in Sarner’s shifting shadows and whiplashing terrains (or are they straining figures?) that leaves the Abstract Expressionists’ urban roil for a maritime haze, an almost meditative balance of sky and ocean and land – a conjuration of Sarner’s Miami childhood and her current proximity to the Pacific -- in which everything slips in and by everything else.

 

Is Sarner’s painting and drawing, then, “true” Abstract Expressionism? Or is it mere stylistic mimesis? If the term “Abstract Expressionism” indicates something beyond an exclusively historic import, then yes, Serner’s work, and her reasons for making it, merit the label, however anachronistic. Hers is a gestural painting that models itself, profoundly and unabashedly, on the mode of abstraction that predominated in postwar America. She depends on native skills and conviction of purpose to manifest what is ultimately a familiar sensibility, one that distinguishes itself at this point through character rather than innovation. That is to say, Sarner is one of the few gestural painters now at work who is by choice technically and ideologically engaged in the re-examination of an historic but not exhausted modality. In effect, she renews the “Abstract Expressionist” label, but not the cliché.

 

This kind of historicism does not hold up if the work seeming to embody it is self-conscious or superficial. Past art movements lift out of the surveys and monographs not by reiterating their original tenets but by suggesting them for contemporary conditions. Robin Jack Sarner responds genuinely and openly to such suggestion. She is not trying to pick up where Joan Mitchell left off; she is trying to realize a body of work that responds, as it happens, to Mitchell’s example, among others’.

 

Sarner shares some impetus with Mitchell. Their faith in abstraction is equally thorough. Their engagement of the painted line and massed brushwork is similar; and their dedication to nature is likewise poignant. Perhaps Sarner is picking up not where Mitchell “left off,” but where we, the audience, have left off. The burden of truth to spirit, then, is not only Sarner’s, but ours.

 

Los Angeles

May 2025