The Natural World
Adam Saks: Everything the Light Touches is your Kingdom
Alluring and dense, Adam Saks’ paintings take us on an incredible journey into fantastic worlds and ecosystems, in an engaging, entertaining and, perhaps, educational way.
Many hidden questions lie behind the complex and colorful worlds of Adam Saks’ paintings. Is it a message about the role of species? Is it a dream of an elevated consciousness or is it the magical reality of the natural world?
The answer, and, at the same time, the beauty of it, lies in the fact that each one of his paintings lets us choose to find in these worlds what we feel in that moment. Almost like a shamanistic ritual in which eating a certain kind of mushroom allows people to get deep in their mind, isolate external influences and find answers within themselves. We can choose to dive in and explore the entire natural cycle of life through colors and shapes in Adam Saks’ works, or we can see degeneration before seeing rebirth. No matter what we perceive in them, these painterly environments are all part of a psychological healing ritual meant to purify and elevate our spirit.
“I believe in nature as an all encompassing experience” states the artist. “To me nature contains the very basis of our human endeavors. First of all, our growing concerns about the fragility of nature and the very fine balance that we base our existence on”.
Placing himself in dialogue with German philosophers who explored existentialist themes, through visual symbolism, Adam Saks creates a structure of metaphors through figurative elements with its own compositional system. A painterly process with different approaches to paint application, in which the elements are placed organically on canvas, some levitating and creating their own order in nature, some geometrically patterned through lyrical abstraction.
“I am interested in the life-cycle of the different organic elements I use in the paintings. Sometimes a foot or a leg or the outline of a horse is protruding from the edge of the painting, giving the painterly space a human dimension and scale” says Adam Saks.
However, the anatomical body parts are rendered transparent or like X-rays, thereby dissolving the human figure into this seemingly natural world. We see brushwork marks of veins and blood vessels. What is important to notice is that the individual motifs are not rendered to a constant scale. A leaf is as big as an arm or several times larger than a pine cone, stressing the collage element of the overall composition. Furthermore, the viewpoint shifts from a micro perspective, with cross sections of plants or mushrooms, where the viewer becomes a spectator to the smallest cell structures, almost like looking through a microscope, to a macro view of an all-encompassing nature perspective, where mankind is relegated to a minor role. These cell structures weave through the paintings binding the elements together.
Art historical references to the 17th century Dutch Golden Age come to mind when looking at Adam Saks’ paintings. The dichotomy of nature, the beauty and looming decay, evoke the atmosphere of the Vanitas paintings commenting on the fleeting nature of life, but rendered with a contemporary outlook.
“I used to work extensively with motifs reflecting Vanitas and Memento Mori” the artist states. “The new paintings are still concerned with these themes but have now shifted into a more positive image about nature. Hence the title of my exhibition at Meliksetian | Briggs, Everything the Light Touches is your Kingdom reflecting how we, humans, stride through nature and the cycle of life.”
The framing of the central image in a white background, further validates the idea of the still life with a positive twist. In a painterly quote, an island of color is surrounded by a bright white surface with mark makings, which opens up the space and condenses the narrative, a metaphor for the synergy between nature and human existence.
— Luana Hildebrandt