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

Provenance:
Artist’s Studio Backdrop

Sasson PEARL (1938–2021)

Born in New Jersey, Sasson Pearl initially pursued a demanding intellectual path: studies in English and American literature at UCLA, then a Master’s and PhD in training 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 in Los Angeles, a landmark venue of the American art scene.

His early works, nourished by 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 buzz of the American art market in the 1960s and 70s, Sasson Pearl chose to withdraw from a scene he regarded as too commercial, preferring to reinvent his painting elsewhere.

In 1972, he left the United States for Europe. After Paris and Vence, he developed in Provence a personal visual language: small formats, industrial paintings, varied materials, soft tones blending gesturality, expressionism, and subtle spatial constructions.
Settled in Paris from 1976, then on the edge of the Rambouillet forest for fifteen years, he asserted a major body of work grounded in working the surface, dripping, and all-over techniques. The canvases, with woody, stratified colors, evoke both prehistoric caves and an organic cartography of matter.

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

Heir to American Abstract Expressionism — Pollock, de Kooning, Sam Francis, Motherwell — Sasson Pearl distinguishes himself with a painting deeply sensory and emotional, where chance continually dialogues with decision. Flat color areas, pours, lacquers, colored sediments and fluid gestures balance in diptychs of great mastery, on the edge of imbalance.

Painter of matter and time, Sasson Pearl makes of 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.