Emil Sands

JO-HS presents the exhibition Encounters, an exhibition by British painter Emil Sands., curated by Georgina Pounds (Director, OMR).

Presenting 9 paintings and a series of works on paper, the exhibition is accompanied by a brief essay by Eleanor Nairne, Head of Contemporary and Modern Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The paintings shown in this exhibition were created at JO-HS Mexico City in 2023.

The whole weight dropped suddenly away - the mind, the knowledge, Love, heavy love, was gone completely, and identity. There was left the mountain-water, the bathers, the foliage; The trees gripped down, swept up, and over stood the sky...

“The Bathers,” Josephine Jacobsen, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, April 1940

Nico’s face is soft and the light is warm on his bare torso; sinews of violet paint twist along his collar bones and left forearm as he wanders by the water, lost in his own thought. Who are these young men who evade our reach? Two stand with their backs turned, thumbs pressed into the soft flesh above their pelvis, hair slicked down their neck, heads inclined towards one another. The scumbled sky suggests the intimacy of their exchange.

The bather is a familiar figure in the history of art. How could an artist resist the tender, sacred moment of a person’s ablutions, especially when there is the added charge of fellow bodies in a state of undress? In April 1877 Paul Cezanne unveiled Baigneurs au Repos at the third impressionist exhibition in Paris but the critics railed against his distorted anatomies and the ambivalent relationship of his bathers to one another (while Edgar Degas got home and was inspired to sketch the central man awkwardly donning his shorts).

A diptych of lonely men enhances the solitude of the protagonists by abutting the canvases together, so that their two worlds embrace one another but remain resolutely divided. The brooding figure on the left is accented by an inky sky, while his companion on the right stands in shallow water, the cool pink around him suggesting the first flush of dawn. These are men who belong to the half-light; the liminal space between day and night.

The other cast of characters in these paintings is the trees - spindly and towering and melting into amorphous forms on the horizon. This canopy has a kind of tranquility to it. There is a sense of verdant medicine on offer to these fragile bodies, who are always already failing to comply with the codes of masculinity prescribed to them. At least amid the quiet of a watery wood there is the possibility that ‘the whole weight’ might just drop suddenly away.

— Eleanor Nairne, Head of Modern and Contemporary Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art