Jane Sandes in her studio Brazilian artist Jane Sandes’ dazzling, bright and enigmatic resin sculptures evoke forms at once natural and artificial, familiar and mysterious. Her training and accomplishments as a painter, sculptor and architect are apparent in every folding, crinkled, curving shape. She uses color both to serve her expressive ends and as a pop art device, deploying strong tones like yellows and reds to evoke spry passion and humor. Each sculpture features only one color, one continuous component and material plane, with various levels, plateaus, ridges and rivets leading the eye through a series of movements and pauses over the entire piece. These integrated objects are, in fact, radically fragmented. Sandes acknowledges similarities between her work and that of Constantin Brancusi, but points to Donald Judd’s colorful minimalism as the more apt parallel. Like his abstract forms, her sculptures are simultaneously stripped and intricate, offering a smoothed and complete object whose multitudinous corners and contortions remain evasive.

In discussing the inspiration for these iconic objects, Sandes notes the influence of the architecture in the region of Brazil where she lives, the shapes and translucent qualities of waves and precious stones, and the visual motifs of shells and urban systems. Certain of her brighter, opaque pieces also resemble the peeled skin of some odd, octagonal fruit, its outer shell meticulously removed in one continuous strip of gleaming yellow. Regardless of the figurative objects they evoke, Sandes’ sculptures invite complete and total exploration from all sides and angles, calling to mind something akin to the three-dimensional equivalent of M.C. Escher’s famous staircases.

We are able to roam Sandes’ sculptures safely in any direction we see fit, though. Their alternately gleaming, matted or boldly colorful surfaces are free from gravity or direction, strikingly new yet oddly timeless and familiar. Neither static nor discernibly dynamic, these surfaces with distinct spatial, architectural properties invite us in and keep us moving, offering pauses on flat planes amidst cascading, rippling forms before urging our eyes onward. Sandes’ uniquely fluid and calm works are both therapeutic and invigorating.

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