The paintings of Diane Di Bernardino Sanborn are like messages from another universe. Playful, mysterious and endlessly amusing, they make us smile, contemplate, then smile again. We feel we have been let in on secrets that can’t be reduced to words. Color is Sanborn’s idiom, and her palette is wide-ranging. One work is aqua and viridian, another ocher and umber, yet another vermillion and gold. Within these beds of color, lines, shapes and symbols unfurl like strands of DNA, according to a logic of their own.
As viewers, we can scrutinize the chains of triangles, ovals and trapezoids and puzzle over their meanings. Are they hieroglyphs or pictographs from the unconscious? We may wonder, but the wiser path is to abandon theory and experience the visual.
In “Kites and Lanterns” orange, blue and chartreuse diamonds pull our eyes merrily around the canvas, as if traversing a fairgrounds. The colors are vibrant but not hard-edged and the softness with which pale blues melt into vegetal greens suggests a natural landscape.
The rounded, golden forms in “Polite Conversation,” which are as voluptuous as naked bodies, also seem to have emerged from the natural world, as do the lavender, cobalt and yellow shapes sprouting amidst the green in “Land of Hopes and Dreams.”
As the titles of these works suggest, Sanborn’s images may hail from another universe, but it’s one that runs parallel to our own. In this, she has something in common with those two Modernist granddaddies of the whimsical, Joan Miró and Paul Klee.
In her washes of gorgeous color and serpentine lines, we discern a dreamscape that feels uncannily familiar and strange at the same time. It’s as if these apparently abstract works reveal things we have always known, even as they challenge us to recognize them.
“A line comes into being … it goes for a walk, aimlessly, for the sake of the walk,” Klee, once observed. He was describing the act of drawing, as a child might experience it. In this way, he captured the adventurous essence of art. In Sanborn’s paintings, we find a healthy dose of that meandering spirit—an eagerness to follow wherever line and color may lead.
Her sensuous explorations are supported by a subtle color sense and a technical mastery of her materials so assured as to go unnoticed. Sometimes the walker doubles back. And occasionally in the pentimento, we can glimpse evidence of an earlier pass. These ghostlike remnants bleeding through add another numinous dimension to the canvases.
“Art,” said Klee, “does not reproduce the visible. Rather, it makes visible.” So it is with Sanborn’s paintings, which reveal to us a reality we would have never seen without them.
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