For his third show at Sadie Coles HQ Daniel Sinsel revisits and expands on a number of his key themes, subjects and forms.
Alongside new paintings and sculptures, there are works that resist easy categorisation, seeming to fall – as so often with Sinsel – between genres and media. A predominate concern is the exploration of shapes – cut-outs, slits, simple geometrical forms – and the various ways in which they define and negate space. Sinsel’s isolation, dissection and reconfiguration of essential shapes and objects betray an underlying minimalist impulse. In one painting tropical leaves are perforated with implausibly perfect circles, investing them with a sculptural character. Another painting constitutes a hard record of experiments in cutting and folding paper;and trompe l’oeil continues as a recorder appears to thread in and out of the canvas. In terms of its prevailing interest in shape, this exhibition forms an unlikely yet illuminating conceptual counterpoint to Carl Andre’s, on at the same time in South Audley Street.
The notion of the fragment also plays a central role. Chocolate bars are disassembled and re-assembled. A plaster sculpture of a foot incongruously grasping a recorder calls to mind fragmented classical sculpture, and conjures up images of pastoral mythology, Arcadia and the figure of Pan – themselves elements of a fragmented record. In the context of Sinsel’s body of work as a whole, this piece also carries a sexual undercurrent: the fetish of the foot and the inter-changeability and ambiguity of forms are rendered manifest.
