Sasson Pearl (1938-2021) - Ensor’s rose

Provenance
The artist's studio background.

Sasson PEARL (1938–2021)

Born in New Jersey, Sasson Pearl first follows a demanding intellectual path: studies in English and American literature at UCLA, then a master's degree and a PhD in preparation at the University of Toronto. It was only in 1963, back in California, that he devoted himself fully to painting and joined the Otis Art Institute of Los Angeles, an iconic venue of the American art scene.

His early works, nourished by Flemish masters and surrealism — Magritte in particular — are quickly noticed. They are exhibited notably at the La Jolla Museum of Art (Continuing Surrealism, 1971) and at the California Institute of Technology (Surrealism is Alive and Well in the West, 1972).
But at the heart of the buzz of the American art market in the 1960s–70s, Sasson Pearl chose to distance himself from a scene he deemed too commercial, preferring to reinvent his painting elsewhere.

In 1972, he leaves the United States for Europe. After Paris and Vence, in Provence he develops a personal pictorial language: small-format works, industrial paintings, various materials, soft tones blending gesture, expressionism, and subtle spatial constructions.
Based in Paris from 1976, then on the edge of the Rambouillet forest for fifteen years, he asserts a major body of work founded on working the ground, dripping, and all-over painting. The canvases, with wood-toned and stratified colors, evoke both prehistoric caves and an organic cartography of matter.

From 1995, Sasson Pearl settles in Tizac-de-Curton, between the Garonne and Dordogne. There, he reconnects with the light and the chromatic vibrations of California, and works there until the end of his life.

Heritage of American Abstract Expressionism — Pollock, de Kooning, Sam Francis, Motherwell — Sasson Pearl sets itself apart with a painting that is profoundly sensorial and emotional, where chance constantly dialogues with intention. Flat areas, pours, lacquers, colored sediments, and fluid gestures balance in diptychs of great mastery, at the edge of imbalance.

Painter of matter and time, Sasson Pearl makes each canvas an event, an experience where the surface becomes place, landscape and memory. His work asserts, with strength and sensitivity, the timeless vitality of abstract painting.