SOMA Living February 2022

ARTIST OF THE MONTH Walking in to Raymond Saá’s Maplewood studio transports you to another place. The space is full of light and plants, there is a riot of color in the pieces that line the walls, and Cuban salsa music emanates from the speaker. The main floor is all paintings, with works on paper and his sewing machines on the lower level. He recalls, “As in many immigrant families, my mother always had a sewing machine on our kitchen table at home. She was constantly making clothes and household items.” He would never have imagined as a child how integral that skill his mother taught him would be to his artistic practice today. For his works on paper, Saá uses an X-Acto knife as a drawing implement to create pieces that are then sewn together into “postcards” – small, rectangular collages that could stand on their own but ultimately become part of the larger composition. Once he has about 60 “postcards,” he arranges and sews them to each other in a pattern of shingles, to create a whole piece that has color, pattern, dimension and depth. His paintings are extensions of the drawing and pattern-making process of the works on paper, but here Saá works in thick canvas that he adheres to thin pieces of wood for stability. He said, “All of my work comes from the discipline and process of drawing and pattern making.” The canvas is cut and edged, with the slightly raised edge

feeling like a drawn line on the painting. He builds and stacks the composition from the bottom up. He looks for the rhythm or tension between two different colors, or the unexpected consequences when you put two different shapes on top of each other creating something entirely new. Saá says that he is inspired by a variety of places, colors, fashion, nature and music. His images present a complex, multilayered environment for the viewer to decipher and find what they will in them.

Elizabeth Harrison Kubany is founder of KUBANY, LLC, a communications firm established on her lifelong belief in the power of architecture, design, and art to make the world a better, more beautiful, and more equitable place. She is also the co- founder, with her husband, of Winterhouse Projects, an online gallery platform that promotes the work of emerging artists. @ElizabethKubany

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