Orbs afloat: a detail from Rene Saheb's "Journey of the Blind Eyes"
Rene Saheb keeps her garden well-watered. Her canvases and sculptures aren’t wet to the touch, but they look like they could be. Drippings run down the surface of her acrylic paintings in bunches. Her sculptures, too, are plump and glistening, full of stacked sacks with pregnant curves and apertures that appear ready to pour something forth. Her colors, too, have the softness, transparency, and blurred quality of flower petals left to soak in a bowl overnight. She gives us undulations, folds, and rich thickness. A Rene Saheb scene always feels a bit like a glade right after a rainstorm: everything ripe and effulgent, with shadows in the mist, and growth happening so fast you could swear it’s happening right before your eyes.
Where does all of this moisture come from? More often than not, it streams from a human body. The water that runs through “Stories, Transformed,” a small but representative exhibition in the spacious public area of the Canopy Hotel (159 Morgan St.) in the Powerhouse Arts District, is mediated by the living figures it touches. A cascade courses from a pair of open lips and trickles between the loose fingers of a disembodied pair of hands. Water coats the exterior of dangling organs that look like human hearts. Tears pour from astonished, wide-open eyes and collect in pools near the bottoms of the canvases. Some of Saheb’s figures are spectral, others are opalescent, others flutter like kites or banners in the wind; what unifies them is their saturation and the ways in which their sinews weep.
Yet this work is not lachrymose. Saheb’s paintings and sculptures might cry, but they aren’t particularly sad. Instead, water is a rude fact of existence: the condensation on a window, the nourishment of a root system, the condition that makes growth possible, the foundation of life. If liquid exudes from the eyes and mouths of the artist’s characters, well, that sure beats dryness. In “Melody of Detachment,” blue arcs fall on a thicket of fingers that spring like a houseplant from the saucer-like head of an orange-skinned human. Though thin red rivulets run from his open eye and down his neck, he’s resolute. There’s a sense that the tears are merely overflow from a fountain-like world, one dense with color and fantasy, pouring around and through Saheb’s subjects.
Instruments or cascades? "Melody of Detachment"
The fluid boundaries in Saheb’s surreal scenes indicate how she sees humanity, how she sees herself, and, perhaps, how she sees you. Should you attain the quality of water, that means you’re hard to pin down. You’re adaptable: if you don’t fit in someplace, you might just trickle over to another before anybody even knows that you’re gone. You cannot be cleaved or pierced; even after trauma, you’ll inevitably re-form.
On the other hand, you’re never going to be anywhere for very long. To flow is to thrive; to stand still is to go stale. In Saheb’s “Harmony of Chaos,” all things are in transit — even if it’s impossible to tell what direction things are going in, it’s pretty clear they’re going somewhere. There are streamers in the sky that could be two-headed birds, domes in the distance, structures that seem to be melting, and faces within faces, heads blurring into other heads, intimations of a peacock tail about to unfold. The melting pylons that dominate the middle of the painting feel like they’re halfway between fingers and tulip petals.
In a scene so strange, it can be hard to get your bearings. But because nothing is sinister — because this is a springlike world, busy with blossoms, soft, and welcoming — Saheb gives the viewer plenty of time to sort things out. Even “The Journey of the Blind Eyes,” the largest and most alien painting in “Stories, Transformed,” is more healthy than haunting. At the bottom of a ten-foot panel, the artist sets six eyeballs afloat on a wash of purplish water. Their lids are heavy, and hang over their blue irises; they resemble seedpods or oysters on the half-shell. But from the pupil of one of the eyes, a goldenrod rises. At least one of these disembodied perceivers is coming to consciousness. Wisps of gold are apparent in a few of the others too, so maybe all of Saheb’s floaters are waking up. It’s a vision of where these travelers are headed: down the river toward a great stand of yellow reeds, watered by a stand of giant oozing gourds, and crowned by a translucent pink shield.
Halos, faces, feathers, fingers, petals
We don’t know much about this destination, and Saheb only hints at what these blind eyes are experiencing as the currents tug them there. What we do know is that sooner or later, they’re destined to arrive. The themes of migration that animate all of this painter’s work are felt acutely in “Journey.” They’re a reminder that millions of people all over the globe must attain that quality of water and flow, on faith, from one place to another. Rene Saheb’s work suggests that it’s going to be a strange trip, but not one without its comforts, amazements, and unexpected safeguards.
The painter and sculptor is herself a traveler: an Iranian-born artist who has only recently made the leap from Tehran to the Jersey City metropolitan area. That her work has the sumptuous color and mythological allusions of Persian art speaks to the connection she maintains to her place of origin. But her vision could apply anywhere people are on the move — a vision of a world as moist as the inside of an eggshell, cracking open to let the light in, promising new beginnings, fresh beams of prismatic daylight, and a wet kiss for the weary traveler.
(The Canopy is not a conventional gallery: it’s the second floor and public bar of the southwesternmost hotel in the Powerhouse Arts District. They’re doing their duty to the arts community in partnership with Arts 14C, and they’ve got the lighting and the sightlines to prove that they’re taking this seriously. Take the elevator upstairs — you can’t miss it. It’s open all day.)
Tris McCall regularly writes about visual art (and other topics) for NJArts.net, Jersey City Times, and other independent publications. He's also written for the Newark Star-Ledger, Jersey Beat, the Jersey City Reporter, the Jersey Journal, the Jersey City Independent, Inside Jersey, and New Jersey dot com. He also writes about things that have no relevance to New Jersey. Not today, though.
Eye Level is an online journal dedicated to visual art in Jersey City, New Jersey. A new review will appear every Tuesday morning at 8 a.m., and there'll be intermittent commentaries posted to the site in between those reviews.
Eye Level is made possible by an Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant.
