Sarah Pillen

On one of the rugged slopes of La Alpujarra, a southern foothill of the Spanish Sierra Nevada mountain range, Sarah Pillen (b. 1976) lives and works alongside her husband Louis De Cordier, operating under the name Cosco.

The artist beholds this unrivalled visual spectacle of rugged Spanish mountains and high plateaus every day through the window overlooking her studio. Nature and the cyclical experience of the seasons set the tone in Pillen’s body of work, alongside a certain penchant for the mystical. She usually paints on paper, and occasionally on linen and panel. An intense focus on detail is one of the most striking aspects of her work. She concentrates on a single element (an olive, an acorn, an almond leaf, a pomegranate seed, seed stalks, etc.) and devotes all her meticulous attention to it. All her works feature a carefully built-up background consisting of multiple thin layers of glazing.

The artist aligns with a discourse on perception similar to that found in the work of Raoul de Keyser. He drew inspiration from his immediate surroundings and related the formal aspects of painting to them. Perhaps more closely related is Agnes Martin’s quest in the New Mexico desert for abstraction, Eastern spirituality and intuition, which transformed into the enduring marriage between art and our awareness of the environment. The mystical ecstasy in Zurbarán’s austerely ordered still lifes also exudes the same spirit, in which everyday objects

Despite the striking interplay between figuration and abstraction, these paintings convey more than just this theme. Here, the splashes are rather traces of the process through which Pillens sharpens her gaze to take in the world around her, in an attempt to translate this process. Accidental streaks and smudges reflect the quest to distil the essence from the greater whole. By analogy with the scorching heat of a terra terrenus, the fruits it produces are marvellous. Despite the harsh conditions, olives, almonds, figs and, in particular, pomegranates flourish. Deep-red seeds enclosed in a tough skin, evoking the deepest roots of our cultural and historical consciousness. Fertile and pregnant with new life. In Pillen’s body of work, the song of the earth is sung in sequential verses to the rhythm of the seasons.

2005-2018   Professor Fine Arts, Luca School of Arts, Ghent, B

1996-2000   Master of Fine Arts, Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Ghent
1995-1996    Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Antwerp
1990-1995    Fine Arts, Painting, Sint-Lukas, Brussels

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