Emil Sands’s unique body of work
Jet lagged, frozen, wrapped in multiple layers against the polar winds of a New York January storm, it was a thrill to walk into a gallery space full of sun-drenched summer scenes. At first glance, these are beautiful paintings of beautiful young people on beaches, but look again and you realize they are a meditation on the fragility of body image and how illusory perfection is. This is a topic Emil Sands is uniquely qualified to portray — more on that later. But first, the paintings: a longer look reveals that the beaches are serving as stage sets and mindscapes for an exploration of vulnerability and exposure — an experience intrinsically tied to the act of sharing space with other near-naked bodies.
