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"Every act of creation is first an act of destruction." Pablo Picasso
Sandra Shashou’s new body of work, comprising of arrangements of smashed fragments of bone china tea sets, oscillates between modalities of dissolution and reformulation, order and rupture, and historical eras.
Her source material is the bone china produced by Europe’s finest porcelain manufacturers, as the titles of her works indicate – Hamilton, Argyle, Tuscan, Royal Albert, Wedgwood, Limoges, Meito hand-painted and Cobalt – and collected by her from dealers and flea markets. The designs range across centuries and topographies: in one work the lemons and blues of Art Deco, in another the crimson of Edwardian and Victorian designs, and in a third the blue tracery of Chinoiserie.
Shashou brings these tea sets back to her studio and using a small hammer she shatters, punctures, chips and fragments. And yet the shapes of the original crockery are somehow preserved and repurposed in her intricate constructions. The curves of the broken tea sets undulate across simple rectangular surfaces, or swirl around rotundas with a baroque flamboyance. In some the pieces lock tightly together as if part of some giant Cubist puzzle, in other shards seem to be caught in the freeze frame of a constructivist explosion. Her chromatically rich, harmonious works match crimsons, mustard yellows and pinks, or mauve, turquoise and blue. Set in a gold or white ground, Shashou’s fragments unfold like Jackson Pollock’s all-over paintings – only shattered, not splattered.
Shashou has found inspiration in the Japanese art of Kintsugi, in which broken bowls were repaired with beautiful golden joins, so fashionable in the 17th century, that people were accused of deliberately smashing valuable pottery so it could be remade in this manner.
Some may read a social comment in her work, a playful rupturing of bourgeois values. The order and tranquillity of a daily routine, with its echoes of Victorian Britain, Alice in Wonderland and social conformity, tea-time, has been literally shattered.
Shashou herself prefers to foreground the emotional and biographical metaphors embedded in the work. Smashing crockery is, after all, a time-honoured feature of the lovers’ row. “Breakage and fractures are part of the chance and fate of human life, part of our personal history,” she says, "I embrace vulnerability and fragility. In truth that is how we reveal ourselves and really connect.” When Shashou has looked back on love that has disintegrated, and reflected on the times when she has felt ‘shattered’, she has realised that the pieces have rearranged themselves in a new harmonious order. “They fitted together but not they did before."
Shashou’s ‘Broken’ sculptures are not inspired by nature or the human form, she draws her inspiration from her experience of life as a woman.
The brutal destruction of these precious objects, desecrated beyond repair, implies tragedy, but the reassembled artwork suggests it has taken on a new form and is reborn.
As a philosophy Shashou treats breakage and fractures as part of the chance and fate of human life, part of our personal history, not something to disguise. ‘Broken references bravery, courage and rebuilding after devastation’.
Resilience, a series of sculptures conceived in celebration of joy, love, integrity and balance, that continue to work through the complexities of vulnerability and fragility that were first articulated in her Broken series.
Moving beyond traditional tropes of framing and hanging, into a playful sculptural mode. Spheres, hearts, plaques, stacks, cubes and other perfect geometric forms predominate. This formal rigour is offset by a lightness and humour that ruptures these codes, and that finds the sculptures stacked or propped against one another in unpredictable and precarious ways.
“Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.” Pablo Picasso
Sandra Shashou’s new body of work, comprising of arrangements of smashed fragments of bone china tea sets, oscillates between modalities of dissolution and reformulation, order and rupture, and historical eras.
Her source material is the bone china produced by Europe’s finest porcelain manufacturers, as the titles of her works indicate – Hamilton, Argyle, Tuscan, Royal Albert, Wedgwood, Limoges, Meito hand-painted and Cobalt – and collected by her from dealers and flea markets. The designs range across centuries and topographies: in one work the lemons and blues of Art Deco, in another the crimson of Edwardian and Victorian designs, and in a third the blue tracery of Chinoiserie.
Shashou brings these tea sets back to her studio and using a small hammer she shatters, punctures, chips and fragments. And yet the shapes of the original crockery are somehow preserved and repurposed in her intricate constructions. The curves of the broken tea sets undulate across simple rectangular surfaces, or swirl around rotundas with a baroque flamboyance. In some the pieces lock tightly together as if part of some giant Cubist puzzle, in other shards seem to be caught in the freeze frame of a constructivist explosion. Her chromatically rich, harmonious works match crimsons, mustard yellows and pinks, or mauve, turquoise and blue. Set in a gold or white ground, Shashou’s fragments unfold like Jackson Pollock’s all-over paintings – only shattered, not splattered.
Shashou has found inspiration in the Japanese art of Kintsugi, in which broken bowls were repaired with beautiful golden joins, so fashionable in the 17th century, that people were accused of deliberately smashing valuable pottery so it could be remade in this manner.
Some may read a social comment in her work, a playful rupturing of bourgeois values. The order and tranquillity of a daily routine, with its echoes of Victorian Britain, Alice in Wonderland and social conformity, tea-time, has been literally shattered.
Shashou herself prefers to foreground the emotional and biographical metaphors embedded in the work. Smashing crockery is, after all, a time-honoured feature of the lovers’ row. “Breakage and fractures are part of the chance and fate of human life, part of our personal history,” she says, “I embrace vulnerability and fragility. In truth that is how we reveal ourselves and really connect.” When Shashou has looked back on love that has disintegrated, and reflected on the times when she has felt ‘shattered’, she has realised that the pieces have rearranged themselves in a new harmonious order. “They fitted together but not they did before.”
Resilience moves beyond traditional tropes of framing and hanging, and into a playful sculptural mode that incorporates the stillness and contained beauty of classical composition. Spheres and other perfect geometric forms predominate, an echo of the precise aesthetic programmes of classical antiquity. This formal rigour is offset by a lightness and humour that ruptures these codes, and that finds the sculptures stacked or propped against one another in unpredictable ways.
In Resilience, Shashou makes reference to the ancient decorative practice of mosaic, juxtaposed here with a suite of contemporary surfaces – concrete, plastic, and resin – that bring the sculptures into a timeless space where histories of art collide in fruitful exuberance. Shashou updates the use of her signature materials – smashed and recombined fine china handpicked by the artist for its singular exquisite delicacy – to develop new forms that, while losing none of their precariousness and intricacy, represent a maturing of her investigations into the resilience of the human spirit.
The richness and beauty of life and relationships are born witness, in this complex interplay of elegant formalism, to a reckless freedom of spirit that remains proud and undiminished.
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“Precious Time” is an abstract collection of personal references which deal with the connections between the mind, the past, the present and the future.
There is a great subjectivity in paint handling and composition thinking that it will connect with the viewer. The paintings are intensely conscious of the present moment disassociating from the mind and compulsive thinking as Shashou covers canvases with intuitive and varied mark making.
There are references to the past and illusions of the future, however, the viewer is unconsciously brought back to the moment with the substantial weight and body of the paint.
She would like the viewer to become involved in the visible painting history of the multi layered work and its physiology, tracking back the richness of the oil paint, the creamy texture of the brush strokes, the chance element of the dripping, the unpredictable accident of paint contrasted by the decisiveness and presence of the palette knife.
Shashou’s abstract paintings take their queue from the surfaces first explored in the skin of her portrait subjects, but open up a new terrain for the artist. Here the accumulation of marks, cuts, tears and splinters build up a surface full of character, and yet are resolutely without a subject – these are not portraits, but, rather, emotional landscapes that confront our physicality by embracing the potential for flaws, errors, and fragmentation; the surfaces speak of a more subjective content.
Shashou says: ‘I am interested in layering symbols of life’s varying experiences; and expressing its underlying vulnerability. The cutting through the stretcher and canvas, distressing it, was a natural progression of the work’.
It does not shock the viewer to see a chainsaw has gone right through the finished painting. ‘Beauty matters to me, but not in a traditional way’. This still risqué gesture of cutting into the canvas might be read as a vandalous act, yet as Fontana – that most famous of ripper artists – explained, the cutting action is not destructive but constructive, and through this motion the painting-object is created.
While, like Fontana, describing her activity as performative, Shashou by contrast sutures sections of the torn material together, adds further areas of paint, creating highly worked and sculptural pieces. Her almost ritual actions over time present thought-provoking palimpsest, or as Shashou puts it ‘provocative, narrative making traces’.
Silk Screen on Mirror Icon Portraits
These works consist of hand printed silk screen on mirror over a collage of original newspaper cuttings. The images are constructed through a complex layering of newspaper cuttings, introducing a fragmented narrative reflecting back into the mirror.
Shashou also presents the Eye Portrait, as a Silk Screen print, a printing process which was very much used by Andy Warhol.
Shashou has been inspired by recent technological developments in digital security known as Iris, in which the pattern of the muscular diaphragm surrounding the pupil, different in every individual, is recorded as a bar code for the person it represents.
The eye, traditionally seen as a doorway to a person’s truth of being has, in the technological world, become a tool for identification due to its intricately beautiful and unique structures. The starting point for the eye portraits are specific close up photographs taken by the artist with a macro lens.
Shashou uses a 10 mm deep white glass to print the image of the Eye, the reflection of the hand printed monochrome black ink bouncing off the deep set glass is very intriguing to the viewer. It is then shown simply with a metal frame.
Shashou has been commissioned to make several Silk Screen on Glass portraits of individuals and families.
This printing technique is made with a silk screen to support an ink-blocking stencil. Basically, it is the process of using a stencil to apply ink onto another material. Each print is done manually and individually.
A second screen can be used to produce a further colour.
Shashou’s expertise in portraiture finds its way to a more abstract mode of expression in the form of Eye paintings.
This recent development in Shashou’s work represents the coming together of her interest in abstraction with her passion for portraiture. In the Eye Portraits she has worked gradually to reduce attention from the face as a whole, concentrating solely on the subject’s eye seen against a background of abstract, monochrome paint.
Shashou has been inspired in these paintings by recent technological developments in digital security known as Iris, in which the pattern of the muscular diaphragm surrounding the pupil, different in every individual, is recorded as a bar code for the person it represents.
The eye, traditionally seen as a doorway to a person’s truth of being has, in the technological world, become a tool for identification due to its intricately beautiful and unique structures. The starting point for the eye portraits are specific close up photographs taken by the artist with a macro lens.
Shashou has combined her love of art and people in creating unique contemporary portraits. These are based on a couple of studio sittings and digital photographs taken by the artist who together with the subject, works in choosing the photograph which most captures their likeness and spirit, making the experience of being painted as special as the portraits themselves.
Shashou’s fascination with the human head has led her to painting often in a large scale as well as reinforcing the physical presence of the sitter by ‘zooming’ in, filling the canvas with the face.
Although her painting language is free with bold luscious dripping brush strokes the image is still a precise, instantly recognisable depiction of the subject.
These portraits are a series representing well-known British and international individuals, icons of British and foreign public life. The images are constructed through a complex layering of newspaper cuttings, introducing a fragmented narrative, while the tonal values of the newspapers are integrated into the image through adjacent layers of paint. Viewing the work from a distance, the collaged and painted elements coalesce into an instantly recognizable image, the face of a well-known personage, while closer examination gives the viewer the reward of a literal reading of the face, snippets of articles partially legible through the paint, while the varied weight, touch and colour of paint marks is both sensual material experience and visual interpretation of character and expression.
Biographical Portraits are a tribute to, and celebration of, the life of the subject. The emotions one gets from these portraits makes them unique.
They are acknowledged as a new dimension in portraiture and are treasured by family and friends, they provide a unique insight into the life and times of their subjects.
These are intimate close up portraits. Compositions begin with a drawing from a zoomed in photograph of the sitter taken by the artist. Shashou collects personal references of his or her life taken from photos, pieces of hand writing and if available, newspaper articles, which she then incorporates into the initial drawing in the form of a collage.
When the painting process begins, the collage made up of text photos and newspapers gradually becomes partially legible through the oil paint creating a simultaneous narrative that is both continuous and fragmented. Observing the work from a distance the viewer immediately identifies the subject. Closer examination gives the viewer the reward of a literal reading of the photographs and text.
Shashou works with rich dripping oil paints. Although her painting language is free, the image is still a precise, instantly recognisable depiction of the subject.
The tonal values of the photographs and text are integrated into the portrait through a complex layering of oil paint. The essence and spirit of the subject is captured through the eyes. The painting is enhanced by the large scale of the composition.
Sandra Shashou has become the portrait artist of choice for high profile individuals, businessmen and loved ones.
‘What Now!’
An attractive open spill of decadent colours and splintered shapes
‘Every act of creation is first an act of destruction’- Pablo Picasso.
Sandra Shashou’s new works derive from her ‘Broken’ Sculptures. This series of Giclée Prints reflect on the fragility of love, documenting the stillness after the storm of the emotionally charged performance of smashing the vintage Spanish Lladro porcelain ballerinas. Subjected simultaneously to calculated disintegration, decisive blows and intentional breaks the dolls have let go of their previous identity and limitations.
This series of prints are a testimony of the brutal devastation of these delicate porcelain collectables, which appear to be desecrated beyond repair, crushed into beautiful assortments of innumerable shattered confetti. Victims of tender explosions, now, mere colourful fragments, which reveal themselves, exposed from the inside out, they unmask our greatest fears, strip away our layers, open, vulnerable and undisguised.
‘I see great beauty in vulnerability, after all, in truth that is how we reveal ourselves and genuinely connect.’ Shashou states, in a society seeking an image of perfection, these Ballerina Shards have no flimsy facades. They have become an attractive open spill of decadent colours and splintered shapes unsure of ‘What Now!’
‘All creativity is based on destruction, the metamorphosis of one thing into another, the end of one entity or state, out of which emerges another’ – Pablo Picasso.
Complex and intricate, exuberant and elegant, Sandra Shashou’s new body of work, comprises of arrangements of smashed fragments of vintage fine bone china tea sets, Russian Lomonosov porcelain, Spanish Lladro and Nao ballerina figurines or German bisque Kaiser nude, dating back to the 1940s, 50s and 60s.
In Shashou’s creative recklessness, there is a comprehensive logic to her deliberate madness.
Coming upon her work for the first time in a gallery, you may think for a moment that you are beholding a classical frieze. The broken porcelain pieces curve round each other, evoking the battle scenes on the sides of ancient sarcophagi or temples, packed with duelling figures with missing limbs, and which have been reassembled, incompletely but meticulously, in the world’s great museums of Antiquities.
To use the classic nomenclature of artistic production, these works are reliefs, shallow sculptures set on the wall, a revival of an artistic form popular in the Antique and Renaissance, but which has been almost forgotten for centuries. Her material is the finest bone china and porcelain figurines collected from antiques markets and dealers. These are not the junky objets trouvés found in skips and flea markets which provide the material for so many assemblages of contemporary sculpture. Her tea sets, figurines and ballerinas, have been produced by Europe’s finest porcelain manufacturers.
Some may read a social comment in her work, a playful rupturing of bourgeois values. The order and tranquillity of a daily routine, with its echoes of Victorian Britain, Alice in Wonderland and social conformity, tea-time, has been literally shattered. Moreover, rather mundane materials have been used to create the characteristic brilliance and sheen of many high profile works of contemporary art. This is a body of work which celebrates craftsmanship while also questioning the role of art today, as a trophy of wealth, sophistication and success. Economists talk of ‘creative destruction’, and Shashou tells us through her cracked tableau, that we live in a world which is unsure about the economic conditions it has destroyed and created. All that gold, all that ornament, comes after all from nothing more than a tea set that someone didn’t want, a discarded luxury, like a broken Jeff Koons. This is the stuff you see littering the marble floors of a palace that has been ransacked. There is, some might say, a trace of revolution in Sandra Shashou’s work.
Shashou herself prefers to foreground the emotional and biographical metaphors embedded in the work. ‘Broken’ references bravery and courage, rebuilding, after devastation. Like rebuilding yourself after a broken love.
‘I see great beauty in vulnerability and fragility, in truth that is how we reveal ourselves and really connect.’
In a society seeking an image of perfection, ‘Broken’ has no flimsy facades’.
Smashing crockery is, after all, a time-honoured feature of the lovers’ row. ‘Breakage and fractures are part of the chance and fate of human life, part of our personal history.’ When Shashou has looked back on love that has disintegrated, and reflected on the times when she has felt ‘shattered’, she has realised that the splintered fragments of herself have come back together to create something more fantastical, better than before.
Something marvellous, glittering and new has been created out of an act of disintegration. Shashou herself likes to refer to the Japanese art of Kintsugi, in which broken bowls were repaired with beautiful golden joins, so fashionable in the 17th century, that people were accused of deliberately smashing valuable pottery so it could be remade in this manner. Collecting is an integral part of Shashou’s practice with a continuous search for her handpicked treasures, destined to be broken.
Shashou in her studio, punctures, chips and fragments. There is an emotional charge in the performance of smashing the delicate and precious porcelain collectables. The blows are decisive, ruthless and reckless. The intentional breaks are free, letting go of their previous identity and limitations. It is a brutal devastation of these chosen porcelain objects, which appear to be desecrated beyond repair, crushed into assortments of innumerable shattered confetti. Victims of tender explosions, now mere colourful fragments that reveal themselves, exposed from the inside out, they unmask our greatest fears, strip away our layers, open and undisguised.
Each work may be made out of hundreds or more discrete pieces. And yet shapes of the original objects are somehow preserved and repurposed. The graceful curves of the broken porcelain undulate across Shashou’s simple rectangular surfaces, or swirl around her rotundas with a baroque flamboyance, which belies the prosaic original uses of the material she uses, and engages playfully with art history.
In the alchemy of her creative process Shashou masterfully draws the fragments that unfold, like Jackson Pollock’s all-over paintings – only shattered, not splattered.
Shashou’s calculated disintegration and simultaneous resuscitation of these inanimate objects is bewilderingly beautiful, mesmerising almost, as your eye is drawn to the dynamics of so many shards of protruding porcelain resting on one another, committed to rebuilding with the broken shards one by one in a series of dramatic and positively innovative works.
The final configuration becomes a powerful, extraordinary, luxurious and profoundly complex form, with an intricate, attractive spill of decadent colours and splintered shapes.
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