Sasson Pearl (1938-2021) - Composition. 1987

Provenance:
Artist’s Studio Background

Sasson Pearl (1938–2021)

Born in New Jersey, Sasson Pearl initially pursued an exacting intellectual path: studies in English and American literature at UCLA, then a master's and a PhD in preparation at the University of Toronto. It was only in 1963, back in California, that he fully dedicated himself to painting and enrolled at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, a landmark venue of the American art scene.

His early works, nourished by Flemish masters and Surrealism—especially Magritte—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). Yet, at the heart of the vibrant American art market of the 1960s–70s, Sasson Pearl chose to withdraw from a scene he deemed 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 tonalities 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 founded on floor work, dripping, and all over. The canvases, with wooded, 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 rediscovers the California light and chromatic vibrations, and works 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 that is deeply sensory and emotional, where chance constantly dialogues with decision. Flats, pours, glazes, colored sediments, and fluid gestures balance in diptychs of great mastery, at the edge of imbalance.

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