Fortunate for the only tools present, through breath and a succinct vocabulary, we met inside white light. Finding your way through love and understanding it seems you have departed. Until then, a blue orb burns and I listen to the bamboo choir.

– Mason Saltarrelli, 8/30/2024

The work of New Orleans-born, Brooklyn-based artist Mason Saltarrelli weaves connections between spirits and objects by utilizing various found and invented roaming symbols. His abstracted narratives are rendered through a meditative inspiration, creating a direct and emotional experience on each canvas. Reducing his marks down to the essential, Saltarrelli’s canvases and works on paper offer a space for free association and introspection. 

The new print edition, From the bow of a bamboo boat, was created in collaboration with master printer Brad Ewing. Working together at Grenfell Press in Manhattan in late September, Saltarrelli began the process of learning how to translate his intuitive imagery to silkscreen; a medium that is both tactile and mechanical. Using pigment sticks and wax crayons, Saltarrelli hand drew the films that were then exposed to UV light, fixing the image to a number of silkscreens. Saltarrelli and Ewing engaged in proofing sessions, trying out various colour choices and locations for some of the artwork’s objects; tightly editing how the marks intersected and aligned on paper. The print’s final detail of a gold ink flame topping a translucent blue orb, brings up associations between the ‘burning’ of imagery to a screen, and how visual light casts illuminated images onto our ocular memory.

Saltarrelli paints and draws expressively, and has developed a revolving visual language of intersecting, nuanced motifs. Rich in allusion, these characters can draw to mind the upside-down hull of a boat; a site of refuge and shelter; illuminated caves; a container or vessel; musical notations; hair framing a face; the sky in its ever-revolving states; gestures of natural surroundings; flickers of imagery and remembrances in the nighttime realms of our minds. His visual practice taken as a whole reads as a collection of invocations, or chapters of a book poeticizing chance encounters and meaningful relationships; haikus composed of colours and forms.

In a world filled with proclamations and definitives, Saltarrelli’s quiet ruminations offer the viewer the chance to instead drift, to claim a moment of calm. His canvases and works on paper act as two-dimensional reliquaries for the memories of loved ones; containers for fleeting energies and experiences. As Saltarrelli has described them, they are hybrid acts of intentional adoration and intuitive thought. The titles of his works are both concise and expansive, poetic allusions, that act as both signposts to possible meaning, and continuously multiplying forks in the road. 

Trading figuration for abstraction, the artist impresses a message of consistency to his viewers through his constant transformation of a familiar cast of marks and gestures, imbuing them with reverence while leaving behind didacticism. By returning over and over to this collection of found narrative symbols, Saltarrelli is amassing something akin to diary entries, which can be read individually or as a collective whole. The letters of his language remain the same, but the assemblage exists as a fluid and interchangeable stanza.

In his text for Saltarrelli’s book of drawings, Rowing, the artist Julian Schnabel offers that: ‘Images and fragments of images of indecipherable narratives, and memories and ghosts, some nameless or names only known to him, dot the shores of the banks, calling out to him for their existence to be included in the tapestry of his voyage. All incidents are small yet there are no small incidents. The smallest details have the utmost importance.’