At once playful and grave, these juicy canvases escape with their lives from the populous genre of thick, colorful, cartoonish, faux-naïve painting through a coherence and an ambition that are new to Ms. Sanditz’s work. The gritty pictorial fantasies meld broad landscape vistas with architecture and other signs of the human urge to survive, multiply, pollute and spread chaos, which all might have been encouraged by a visit to China. Industry is the subject, as signaled by titles like “Underwear City,” “The World’s Largest Sock Market,” “Wooden Toy Town” and “Pearl Farm Underwater II,” a bulging stalagmitic image that was mostly painted upside-down.
Written by Roberta Smith