The Freaks Are Stealing Our Sunshine

When he finds his way through the painting, Bill Saylor moves forward with a minimal outline of a plan. With only open-ended, malleable sketches, Saylor allows the composition to build with the paintings materiality. Some images arise along the way — flames, jellyfishes, eyes, suns, tentacles or teeth. They might come from the dichotomy of his childhood spent in the Pennsylvania wilderness where his father raised racing pigeons, and where encroaching industrialization of the landscape was ever-present. Or maybe from his experience as a diver in Californian deep waters. Or, quite simply, from his dreams.
It doesn’t matter. Very quickly the images no longer count. We can abandon the comfort of realism. Painting, alone, takes over. And we sink into its multiple layers, into its striking colors. Its pure forms. Large supernatural spaces that become paintings.
Bill Saylor paints outdoors in the vastness of a Pennsylvanian field. Or between the four tight walls of his studio in Bushwick, Brooklyn. In these two places, he is flooded by the full force of the elements. First of all: the weather. This last summer, which was particularly arid, forced him to leave Pennsylvania to take refuge in New York. The high temperatures influenced his psychology, and the very materiality of his paintings. The colors are burning. And the title of his exhibition — “The Freaks Are Stealing Our Sunshine” — tells how global warming, and those responsible for it, are turning the sun into an enemy, banishing the joy usually brought by its rays.
Since the 90s, Bill Saylor has been painting. Before the Internet and Instagram. Long before painting found itself trapped in the screens of our phones. Original figure of the Manhattan Meat Packing district, where he created works that would first appear in Kenny Schachter’s roving exhibitions, and later Brooklyn scenes, he is an inspiration for a large number of artists — from Jordy Kerwick to Eddie Martinez and Katherine Bernhardt. His career is unique in its duration, in its commitment and its density.
 
He is represented by Magenta Plains gallery in New York and Loyal Gallery in Stockholm. He was artist in residence at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa.
 
”The Freaks Are Stealing Our Sunshine” is his first exhibition in France. cadet capela wanted to show the work of a essential artist for a whole generation. And for many artists represented by the gallery

Boris Bergmann