Howard County Times
Visual Arts: HCC exhibit
Howard Community College’s Rause Company Foundation Gallery
January 27, 2011
Painter heads for the open seas
Artist Michael Sastre is selectively representational in his work and has tightly cropped paintings that feature what is on and around small rafts. There are no people on these tiny boats and the boats themselves seem so slapped together that you might find yourself thinking they belong to desperate refugees who no longer occupy them.
Sastre’s numerically titled “Rafter Series” amounts to a narrative in which you’re only given suggestive clues. Bananas sit on one raft, a fish has somehow ended up on the floor of another and a seagull perches on the side of a third.
The absence of a direct human presence is rather haunting, and it also seems a bit ominous owing to the sharks, fish and other sea creatures submerged or partly breaking through the surface of the surrounding water.
In terms of his painterly approach, Sastre favors crisply depicted rafts and visibly raised definitional lines for the waves. Even though the fish tend to float in and out of focus, the overall compositions rely on assertive colors and sharp distinctions.
Sastre also exhibits glass mosaics, including “Fishing Boy”, in which the young subject engages in that activity thanks to the blue and green glass shards used to depict him. Other glass and tile mosaics present appetizing images of crabs and other seafood. These are cheerful images, to be sure, but they’re decorative and don’t prompt the prolonged consideration that the paintings do.
By Mike Giuliano