Emil Sands: Salt in the throat

Kasmin announces its first solo exhibition of work by New York-based painter Emil Sands (b. 1998, London). For his debut exhibition in Chelsea, Sands explores shifting codes of human behavior and the influence of the surrounding world in a suite of new paintings. In the open air of a seascape or the shadows of a dense forest, Sands’ settings act as stage sets in which his cast of characters perform, reading one another's subtle gestures. As he exaggerates these figures and invites viewers to extrapolate on their relationships, Sands' considered brushwork and intuitive use of color combine to construct narratives filled with sensitivity and pathos.

In Salt in the throat, Sands' impressionistic tableaux blur the boundary between portraiture and landscape, delighting in the beauty and potency of expansive scenery. With their bodies exposed to the outdoors, the painter’s subjects engage in quiet exploration, contemplation, and play. Occasionally, they present themselves assertively as a knowing recipient of another’s gaze. Gestures find repetition—a bent elbow or a hand on a hip call to mind the striking stance of Cézanne’s The Bather (c. 1885, MoMA). Several stand in relaxed contrapposto, a pose of classical sculpture that Sands invokes even as he disregards the conventions of idealized bodies, using partial nudity to exaggerate eccentricities in their appearances. While the works may reveal a voyeuristic impulse in their viewers, the subjects’ unassuming poses resist a sexual charge, serving only to emphasize Sands’ inquiry into the human body.

The exhibition title borrows from Sylvia Plath’s disorienting poem “Berck-Plage” (1962), noted for its uncanny use of metaphor to explore the cycle of human life. Just as those in Plath’s poem ambiguously straddle perceptions of innocence and mischievousness, Sands’ subjects appear variously at ease and in tension with the environment. In The invitation (2024), four young men find an oasis in a river setting, free to move and play in the paradise of open air. Three of the men leisurely tilt their heads downward to gaze at the water swallowing their feet. The fourth faces the viewer with an expression both inviting and cautionary. His guarded stance creates distance around the scene, highlighting exclusion as a contingency of intimacy.

Sands constructs these compositions from the perspective of an outsider—one who may be welcomed, but whose invitation is not guaranteed. Drawing on his experience of living with cerebral palsy, the artist reflects on the ways that a limitation in one’s physical movement can impose the role of observer. His work argues for painting’s ability to positively exploit this imposition and invokes its capacity to revise strained personal memories of the outdoors with a charged sense of freedom. The sky, emblematic of such possibility, becomes a central subject in Tide pool crab land (2024), carefully constructed in distinct passages of thin layers. The paint thickens below, dissolving into pure color play as a lone figure charges forward—or cautiously retreats—against a pronounced horizon. Stepping over a gleaming puddle, he appears to walk on water, as if to achieve the impossible. Such perceived accomplishments stoke the sense of isolation that characterizes Sands’ paintings.


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