There is a recurring ambivalence in the works of Patric Sandri: subtle conflicts between form and content, space and surface, between the autonomy and contingency of an ‘image’. On one hand, Sandri’s practice could be interpreted as a subversive deconstruction of traditional panel painting, but conversely his techniques and materials express a devoted commitment to the medium’s most fundamental elements. Structural features of the canvas such as the stretcher frame and its wooden support struts are repeatedly used as key compositional subjects, foregrounding the sculptural and architectural qualities of painting. Meanwhile, notions of ‘image’ in the work are often elusive, ephemeral, or displaced by perceptual illusions, as though reluctant to admit their material conditions.

Displacement, projection, reflection – interior edges, reverse surfaces. These are important devices throughout Sandri’s practice. Soft light seems to hum from an unseen source somewhere behind or within a canvas; a coloured glow framing clean, diagrammatic compositions. This is a simulation created by applying bright neon pigment to the hidden inner edges of the stretcher frame, which then radiates a blush of colour from the wall behind the painting. In place of traditional canvas, Sandri stretches the frame in translucent voile fabric so that the colour radiates through, appearing to hover in an illusory space, gloating its apparent independence from both voile and wall. However, dependency and contingency are really at the core of these works, as the appearance of the colour-image relies entirely on its surrounding context: it exists only as a relation of proximity and reflection between the ambient light of the room and the architecture surrounding the work. Since the neon-painted surfaces are turned furtively toward the wall, only a hazy projection is suggested to the viewer.

Sandri works within a concise visual language, an anagrammatic reworking of a set principles. He has compared his approach to a mathematical exercise: an effort to map out nuanced relationships between space and image. He continues his investigation of contingency and contextuality in these relationships with another subversion of painting’s structural elements, in which sections of coloured polyester are fixed in layers to the frame’s wooden support struts. Here, colour does not float ambiguously but is bound securely to the structure. The wooden struts, located at various heights within the frame, remain visible through the translucent mesh and thus become formal elements of the composition. The patchwork of coloured fabric is subdued and compressed by a final layer of translucent white mesh – a process which Sandri likens to the application of glazes to secure pigment in traditional oil painting. However, despite the fixing, binding, securing gestures inscribed in these works, fluidity and uncertainty remain. The layering of polyester mesh creates a ‘moiré’ effect: a perceptual interference caused by the overlaid gridded weave of the fabric. Surfaces purr with visual friction as one moves towards or past the work. Unpredictable patterns emerge, shift, lapse. This then, is another ambivalence between form and content: the layered mesh is both what contains and displaces the image. The image is dependent on its medium, and yet refuses to stay fixed.  

Movement is an important painterly tool throughout Sandri’s practice, as it widens the potential for perceptual errors and contradictions which inform his compositional ideas. This attention to movement also indicates the significance of architecture, not only for Sandri’s works, but indeed for any encounter with images. Architectural structures shape a viewer’s passage through space, thus creating or denying certain perspectives, and thus determining which images are revealed or concealed. Sandri’s practice repeatedly points to this contingency of perception, reflecting on the idea that an image is never independent of its medium, context, or the gaze of a viewer, but depends delicately on the interaction of these elements. In these works, colour arrives indirectly; the material conditions which create an image are also what obscures or destabilises it. By creating ambivalent contradictions between appearance and concealment, structure and fluidity, Sandri’s works resist decisive categorisation. Ambivalence here is not felt as a frustrated impasse, but rather a graceful suspension of conclusion.

Text by Bryony Dawson