“California felt physical to me,” Raymond Saunders told SFMOMA in 1994. “I prefer to be [there] really for just those reasons, that I like how it feels.” California is very much a lead role in Notes From LA, David Zwirner’s Los Angeles presentation of Saunders (1934–2025) work and curator Ebony L. Haynes vision for the showcase (this is her third curation of Saunders work at Zwirner spaces, previously shown in NY and Paris), but it isn’t it’s only star. Saunders made a studio, at times, in Oakland and Venice, but also Paris, and though the energy of the work feels of the West Coast, it also is very much of an artist looking out at the world-at-large and understanding the social and political changes occurring throughout much of the second half of the 20th century.
What I found so profoundly interesting in the works that Haynes selected was how alive they were, not just with the mark-making but the construction of each work. Saunders allowed for seriousness and humor, self-reflection and community-input in the works. He found what was lost and discarded around him and showed that it all could have a second life. Chalk, paint, metal, crayons, signage, cardboard, magazine covers, the residue of life both in and out of the studio, is present. As both a teacher and an artist, he was informing others as well as himself on the previous limitations of a painting, and seemed to be educating the audience at the same time. In the press release to the showing, there is a quote from his friend, Toni Morrison, that resonates so deeply: “From an environment of the lost, the discarded, Saunders creates another wholly inscribed world of found things in which chalk and metal and paint and wallpaper and toys and insignia combine to destabilize and soothe us—then to change us altogether like a tropical medicine belt. Glorious.”
The standout work in the show to me was Untitled (Apartheid), 1989, a mixture of Situationist graffiti style and work-in-progress aesthetic that has a spirit that draws you in. It has all the hallmarks of Saunders work, the politics, the note-taking, the note-collecting, the remnants of studio life and the layers of ideas all in one work. It is both of the world and wholly of his own practice. There is nothing limiting to the work, there is no rules to what a painting is, it is a work full of life and a sound that can be heard.
Haynes also carefully compiled two vitrines that serve as a wonderful juxtaposition to the paintings. Here you see his history in real time, the letters he received, the objects he collected, the life of an artist through the decades. Saunders was connected but also quite comfortable with being his own artist. Haynes noted in her introductory walkthrough at the show how much of Saunders own collecting informed the works, and as she engaged with the the artist’s studio before his passing last year, it was essential to include this major part of his life.
An anecdote shared at the opening was Saunders own reticence of showing in a big white cube. That he wanted his work to live in other spaces, other places. But even here, in one of the leading white cubes in the world right now, the physicality of Saunders’ career overcomes what he may have thought as a limitation, and in fact, informs the viewer of the limitless possibilities of the work itself. —Evan Pricco
