Art Basel

Press release

For Art Basel Hong Kong, John Sandroni (b. 1994) has created a new series of paintings investigating the triviality of mass-produced objects and moments captured in New York’s Chinatown. Sandroni is negotiating familiarity, biography as well as working to insert enchantment back into the ordinariness of everyday life.

Scenes and encounters from Sandroni’s life are painted into a precise and arresting visual gesture. His starting point is in the vernacular outside of the studio, wandering the street markets of New York’s Chinatown and taking images of seemingly insignificant objects for sale with his phone.

The public nature of these moments captured by Sandroni allude to the return of this artificial tactility to a medium in which to flourish. Stacked tableware and folded fabrics have a sentimentality to them, seemingly belonging to another time, of ornate objects, representative of an obsolete interior design.

In Sandroni’s paintings, the flower motive in its figuration is no longer understood just as a natural and romantic subject, a mere object of contemplation but it is synthetic and portrayed as a functional object. It is made of silk, or printed on blankets or towels, displayed as a mundane commodity, opening up the potential to be engaged with on a more conceptual level.