HASANI SAHLEHE

Sahlehe’s practice is rooted in contemplative investigations of colour and abstraction. His simple compositions feature overlapping blocks of colour, which produce a distinct visual rhythm. Sahlehe’s approach is akin to that of a jazz musician who reinterprets a familiar standard in surprising ways; he introduces elements of intuition and improvisation into his rhapsodic variations on colour and material.

The artist applies paint on raw canvas via two alternate methods: by spraying diffused acrylic paint with an airbrush and by pouring viscous acrylic gels directly on top of canvas, working flat on his studio floor. He describes this process as a means of allowing color to become one with the canvas, to emerge from its surface with immanent luminosity. As Sahlehe repeats this process with idiosyncratic variation, his paintings become both artifacts of a meditative practice and experiments in color.

The artist has used musical analogies to describe his work. The titles of his recent solo exhibitions include New Songs (106 Green, New York, 2021); Favorite Song (Tif Sigfrids, Athens, GA, 2023); and Song Ideas (CANADA, New York, 2024). Speaking about the new body at Night Gallery, Sahlehe offers a similar, lyrical distinction. While his previous paintings—characterized by deeply saturated hues and stark juxtapositions—evoke the raw expressiveness of hard bop, the new paintings represent a shift towards more mellifluous and harmonious visual melodies. If earlier works brought to mind John Coltrane’s piercing saxophone, these paintings share more in common with Alice Coltrane’s harp. Ethereal and serene, they reflect an almost cosmic perspective on color, form, and perception.

Sahlehe doesn’t just employ abstraction as a stylistic mode, but raises questions about abstraction’s very nature, in art as in life. He notes that even to imagine what constitutes something as fundamental as ‘the world’ or ‘other people’ relies on the human capacity for abstract thinking.

In this sense, Sahlehe’s blocks of color belong to a lexicon of forms that transcends the relatively recent history of abstract painting—they are the standing slabs of Stonehenge, the rudimentary building blocks of childhood playtime, shapes arranged and rearranged in order to make meaning out of what we see.