"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."
“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!’
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