Contributed by Sutton Allen / With his show at Donald Ryan Gallery, E.M. Saniga join the esteemed company of artists who have eschewed fashion for the sake of personal vision. His real kin are Albert Pinkham Ryder and Courbet. He and Courbet are both interested in the raw beauty of country life yet also share an urbane sensibility. Saniga’s experience is made tactile through carefully modeled half tones and a calculated and surprising facture.
The artist lives in rural Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and has centered his life on outdoorsmanship and his art on the nude, the figure in landscape, and the paraphernalia of the hunt. The gallery’s selection mirrors the deliberate slowness of Saniga’s approach. His scale is modest, but his aspirations are grand. His surfaces reveal a quiet struggle to calibrate image and tone. Many have a thick layer of dust, and all sport irregular, artist-made frames, some very finely wrought. It is fitting to see work of this quality in a gallery of understated beauty and simplicity. Its proximity to the Frick somehow reinforces Saniga’s fresh adherence to the precedent of carefully modeled forms from life vigorously observed. While he exhibits contemporary wit and quirkiness – particularly in later works such as Teaching Sit – Saniga is trying to mirror high painting of the past.
The largest work, Two Does from 1986, is the oldest and most gruesome. Two severed deer heads rest high up in a snow-filled landscape at dusk or dawn. A lesser artist might have reveled in the gore, but Saniga apprehends it with deep humanity while keying the whole show to the compelling grisliness of country life. The painting’s novel composition and its explorations of light and color are echoed in more recent works.
I particularly admired Woman with a Bull and a Dog, a small work painted with knowing sensuality. A reclining woman dominates the picture, a small English pointer sitting in front of her and a large bull immediately behind her. The horizon is dotted with trees and a house. She wears a long purple dress, a green patterned top, and a false collar. A straw hat sits tilted atop her head. The work has a composite quality that is peculiarly Saniga’s, each element seemingly pulled from other paintings and subtly combined. The result is rather goofy and the approach intriguing.
Sunbathers on the Grass, a recent work, depicts a similar environment, but occupied by two nude women on a blanket, a turtle, a plate of fruit, a horse in the distance, and a man putting a golf ball. It’s another composite image, and the gathered motifs offer a tour of the artist’s life with a touch of irreverent humor: a grand, inventive presentation in the manner of Manet. These two paintings make notable conceptual concessions, omitting the blinding light of the sun at noon and the heightened shadows at dusk and dawn. He prefers soft light to accommodate delicate form, privileging harmony over verisimilitude, which produces fanciful inventions.
Saniga has eschewed fashion, so his work has found its way to a coterie of devoted idealists, among them the late Gérard Louis-Dreyfus, the French-American billionaire philanthropist and businessman. About one hour north at the Dreyfus Foundation, a public collection, are two dozen Sanigas, including still lifes, along with a large collection of kindred contemporary paintings. Donald Ryan Gallery has privileged his figurative and semi-narrative compositions, certainly the artist’s more daring undertakings.
He has also exerted considerable influence on young and mid-career painters. When I had lunch with him and his wife Karen several years ago, I was visiting my friend Abigail, who was living with the Sanigas. Horses across a stream wandered behind a steel gate, a dozen dogs barked from behind their cage, and a wheezing cat wandered the grounds, finally settling at my feet. Saniga had been looking at Abigail’s pictures, which were lined up on his front porch. Other painters had been working in the field near the horses but now reclined on a mellow hill. They were talking, one wagging a finger and another tilting their head back into the sun. Up the hill, we drank beer on the stone patio in the early August heat. Someone in our company commented on the joy of seeing painters’ work in the countryside. “Now it looks like they’re philosophizing,” Saniga retorted. While we sat he told a story about another young painter in residence who, asked to give an artist’s talk at a college, lectured instead on how to drink his favorite kinds of alcohol. Saniga said it was one of the better talks he had heard and I believed him.
“E.M. Saniga: Paintings,” Donald Ryan Gallery, 15 East 71st Street, 2A, New York, NY. Through April 25, 2026.
About the author: Sutton Allen is a New York-based artist.
