"...I have seen a lot of paintings through a microscope and I think that’s really fascinating, because that’s when you do see its pure archeology."
-Analia Saban
Analia Saban's work blurs the distinctions between mediums, employing elements of painting, sculpture, photography, printmaking, and architecture in a way that deconstructs and revisualizes the very process of art-making. Her work often probes the condition of contemporary painting, inspired by her realization during art school that her peers in the painting department were the most financially successful. For example, in an early series of works Saban unraveled a painted canvas and re-wove the threads into scarves, and rolled them into a "Painting Ball". In another work, she emptied one hundred and ten pounds of paint onto a stretched canvas, which then sagged and bent, and would, over time, entirely break the canvas and frame. Her techniques have been described both as scientific and as archeological, due to Saban's curiosity and awareness of the larger social implications of her material, object-based inquiries.
If Saban's project emerges as one of topological ambiguity, it is because of her decision to produce undecidable objects, artworks that mess with the protocols of media determinacy and tactics of representation. With painting, photography, sculpture, the readymade, the trompe l'oeil, and abstraction alternately shifting and superseding each other — this ambiguity is grounded in a continuous re-inscription of the rhetoric of painting's death, a narrative of catastrophe that has long overcome hyperbole and is comfortable with its own taming.