“How can one describe Tom Sanford’s art? A Henry Fuseli kind of nightmare? A Heironymus Bosch nightmare? Perhaps but not really. Think being blindfolded while running around naked on LSD, PCP, Angel Dust and Bath Salts through a John Currin retrospective. Or being trapped in a room full of homicidal Chucky dolls stabbing your eyes with their knives. Sanford’s work could also be described as the feeling one gets from watching their elderly parents having sex.” - Noah Becker, Editor-in-Chief WHITEHOT MAGAZINE
Although generally shunned and reviled by critics and scholars alike, a few have taken on Sanford work.
Among the most mischievous of image makers working today, Tom Sanford wields the visual acuity of pictorial veracity to cut through mediated distance, laying bare ugly truths with satiric incision that lets us laugh just enough to disguise the more visceral flinch in our gut reaction. His terms of exaggeration, whereby caricature is a nearly sincere form of flattery, are emotional and epistemological- not so much an abnegation of truth as an investigation into what any truth might actually mean. That he does so in a common language and through events, figures and signs we all readily recognize, dispels the clutter of commentary so that clarity itself may guide us ever more deeply into the utter confusion by which we experience the hyper reality of events and existence itself. Rare in the art world today, his art actually makes sense, but it is that very rationality that gives room for the inane absurdity of his subjects to manifest their own irrationality.
Among Sanford’s favorite tropes by which he consistently frames the contemporary to a wider skeptical scrutiny is the academic genre of History Painting. Hierarchically considered above all other genres as the aesthetic epitome of fine art since its inception in the Italian Renaissance and until Modernism rendered such terms obsolete four centuries later, History Painting is the ideal medium for Tom Sanford’s uncanny confluence of signification and meaninglessness. Trivia, be it sports statistics, public opinion polls or nasty gossip, is only important in so far as we obsess over it, and fascinated as many of are by these things, Sanford takes this mass mania into the realm of personal fetish and public spectacle. By historicizing current affairs and giving the historical patina of grand import to contemporary figures- in this show the savaging of artist Shepard Fairey by leftist squatters in Copenhagen, a fatal stampede of sale hungry shoppers at a discount store amidst the economic crash of America, and the rise of the angry white voter in an early Tea Party rally, but in the past he’s given similar treatment to the killing of metal star Dimebag Darrell, a brawl at a music awards ceremony and populated his paintings with personages like Kate Moss, L’il Kim, 50 Cent and Tupac Shakur- Tom Sanford manifests the myopia by which we focus on the incidental while ignoring the larger issues and underlying forces that direct these events, as well as our delirious dedication to them.
Working inversely but to very much the same effect as his latest body of work included here, cheaply commissioned paintings of Mao from China the artist reworks to generic impersonations of identity, Sanford’s historical paintings invest petty behavior with heroic import and transform the quotidian into epic allegory. History Painting, from the Latin historia, or literally ‘story- painting,’ offers Tom Sanford the ultimate vehicle for getting across the imperatives of narrative by which the stories he tells dissimilate the modified and manipulative hybridity of news in the age of infotainment. His re-creation of events belong to the hyperbole of docudrama reenactments yet are rendered with an attention to detail and visual verisimilitude that could well place them in the journalistic documentary tradition of witness photography. Like Mao, the iconographic is both absolute and infinitely malleable, a truth posited in the telling and given certainty only as it is agreed upon.
At once prurient and voyeuristic, the pathos and absurdity by which this artist delineates the mutant persona of fame and notoriety in our society brings to mind the hysteria by which urban
myth and conspiracy theory constitute a new kind of alternative reality today. As such they hearken back to the mythological and religious subject matter that was the original province of historical paintings, but it is not even the subject that matters so much here. Declamatory and authoritative, these are not just incidental paintings; they are History Paintings, a ‘you are there’ fabrication where actuality is made epic and grandly monumental in style and scale. We like it all larger than life, these paintings remind us, precisely because as such they are not life. And it is hard to think of an artist working today who paints fiction’s great impersonation with the deftness of our consensual deception than Tom Sanford. -Carlo Mccormick
The above video was produced to accompany a catalogue produced for Aftermodernism part 2, a 2020 exhibition of Benjamin Edwards and Tom Sanford at Mucciaccia Contemporary gallery in Rome. In the video curator Cesare Biasini Selvaggi discusses the two artists work in the context of the political and social turbulence of Trump era America.
Tom Sanford's paintings, on the other hand, arise from very heterogeneous influences that start from the Renaissance, passing through the nineteenth century, Surrealism and Pop Art up to modern day advertising and comics. His works range from still lifes to genre paintings: "His human figures review a varied humanity, with villains and victims, tragedies and triumphs of the moment. In his still lifes he is more interested in the image than in the object depicted "- as Biasini Selvaggi explains -" It is the image, therefore, that prevails over the object, because it is immobile, almost always the same as itself, devoid of feelings , abstract form ". Sanford mixes high and low register, using an essentially postmodern pictorial style, borrowing from the history of art reinterpreted according to contemporary codes.
While not really criticism, if you’d like to here a young, callow Sanford make a thorough fool of himself, then enjoy this Bad at Sports interview from 2007 or so: