Sasson Pearl (1938-2021) - Composition. 1987

Provenance
Artist's studio background

Sasson PEARL (1938–2021)

Born in New Jersey, Sasson Pearl initially pursued an intellectually demanding path: studies in English and American literature at UCLA, followed by a master's 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, a landmark venue on the American art scene.

His early works, shaped by the Flemish masters and surrealism—Magritte in particular—were quickly noticed. They were 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 bustle of the American art market in the 1960s–70s, Sasson Pearl chooses to distance himself from a scene he deems 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 visual language: small-format works, industrial paintings, diverse materials, soft tones blending gesturality, 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 the all-over technique. The canvases, with woody, stratified colors, evoke both prehistoric caves and an organic cartography of matter.

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

An heir to American Abstract Expressionism — Pollock, de Kooning, Sam Francis, Motherwell — Sasson Pearl sets himself apart with a painting that is deeply sensorial and emotional, where chance continually dialogues with deliberate choice. Flat planes, pours, lacquers, colored sediments, and fluid gestures balance in diptychs of great mastery, at the threshold of imbalance.

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