Hasani Sahlehe
Song Ideas, Sep 4 – Oct 5, 2024

CANADA is excited to present Song Ideas, Hasani Sahlehe’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The show nods to color field painting, with direct making and a lyrical approach to color. The stripped down, abstract properties of the paintings take them out of the realm of metaphor, granting process, drawing and color the power to transmit sensation and thought.

The paintings range from large to medium-large and are formatted vertically. They are made up of solid bars of bold acrylic color that are poured onto face up canvases. Sahlehe mixes his paint with gel acrylic medium to achieve his desired consistency, viscous and ropey. He spreads the pooling and puddling paint with a brush but keeps traces of his hand muted. The paintings aren’t fussy, as evidenced by the drips of acrylic that curve around the edges. He also uses an automotive spray gun to apply a thinned-out layer of the same paint to create light scrims of color that contrast with the molten hard candy quality of his poured pigment. Like the physical states of water, solid, liquid, and gas, Sahlehe finds a variety of properties in a single material which points to an alchemical approach to art making. Sahlehe’s paintings are full of guided accidents: bubbles in the acrylic, the incidental ways the edges of the forms touch, overlap or stay separate, and even an occasional insect that gets caught in the wet paint like ancient life suspended in amber.

Drawing is an important part of Sahlehe’s practice. Over the years, he has filled sketchbooks with renderings of imaginary structures such as pyramids, temples and open-air art galleries. Gradually, the spaces around the structures disappeared, foregrounding blocky post and lintel constructions that fill the canvases without reference or context. Recently, Sahlehe has switched to doing his preparatory sketches on an iPad, preferring the frictionless ease of getting his ideas down with speed. The variety that Sahlehe achieves from his vocabulary makes the show feel like a mediation on the power of seriality. Reds, dark or lemon yellow, purples and a wide range of greens flicker across the surfaces, harmonizing or creating dissonance as they touch. The paintings flow with an all-at-once musicality. The soaring freedom of his palette and his idiosyncratic technique deliver slightly off kilter stacks of color that feel alternately solid or breezily precarious.

Hasani Sahlehe (b. 1991, St. Thomas, Virgin Islands) lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia. His work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta, GA; SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA; Adams and Ollman, Portland, OR; MARCH, New York, NY; Tif Sigfrids, Athens, GA; Tops Gallery, Memphis, TN; and Gallery 12.26, Dallas, TX, among others. His work was included in the 2021 Atlanta Biennial at Atlanta Contemporary. He is a recipient of a 2023 Macdowell Fellowship. Sahlehe's work is in the permanent collections of The High Museum of Art and the Georgia Museum of Art. He received his BFA from Savannah College of Art and Design in 2015.

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