Sarah Schlesinger: Two Trees Tennis Elbow 136

It’s time to read Candide.

It’s been 265 years since Voltaire published Candide, ou L’Optimisme, the wonderful, hilarious and brutal satire of optimism, in which the naïve hero gets put through life’s wringer feet first. Meanwhile in 2024, what the great rationalist-cum-optimist Leibniz called “the best of all possible worlds” is looking less like a realm based on reason and more like one that will not even listen to it. 

How does one respond? The painter Sarah Schlesinger not only puts her paintbrush right on this high-pressure point, her work in some ways formulates a beautifully reasonable response. 

This may not be immediately apparent. To the casual eye, her paintings are so simple they might almost seem safe. To the casual observer they are mostly paintings of evergreen trees, often the luxuriant Alberta spruce, vaguely conical in shape (as is their wont) but rather shaggy in upkeep, as if only occasionally clipped—a far cry from the manicured topiaries of Versailles. Schlesinger, who grew up outside Philadelphia, learned the plein air tradition and graduated from the New York Academy of Art, paints in oil on canvas in a gray scale of greens from darkest Prussian to bright chartreuse. 

They look clear, simple, serene, idyllic—detached from everyday life. But Schlesinger’s simplicity is duplicitous. Behind the plein-air-itude lurks a surreal sense of mischief that owes more to Magritte than Corot or Constable. For one, if you look closely, you will see two trees where you first saw one, the artist playing with illusion and perspective to subvert your basic assumption. Likewise, the stone-like solidity of the trees falls apart like lace the closer you look, suggesting something softer, flimsier, more porous and precarious. (They don’t exactly say “lean on me.”) 

Fittingly, in fact, Schlesinger does not paint en plein air, anyway—she makes everything up from whole cloth. Landscape meets mindscape. 

“I love observational work for fun, but it doesn’t really have a place in my studio,” says the artist. “I’m more interested in making images, in compositions and colors. I don’t want to be beholden to what I am seeing. I want there always to be a push and pull of what’s real and what’s not. What am I being shown? What am I really seeing?”

Echoing that tension, the artist appreciates how the quotidian backyard views, suggestive of the leisurely summers she spent as a child at her family’s country house in Massachusetts, actually teeter precariously between nature and culture. That is, between how trees really grow and how we bend and clip them to our will—the eternal struggle between the real present and the yearned-for future. Or a longed-for past. 

So while gardening might seem fairly innocuous subject matter, for Schlesinger it represents a fundamental and perpetual struggle in life—to negotiate with and control our environment, to create our own edenic paradise on our own terms, trying to recreate and regrow the mythic garden while also planting and pruning it to our own image. Call it utopiary. 

Though for the moment the New-York-based artist is only able to do container gardening here in the city, she dreams of a time when she will finally have a plot of land and be able to garden herself. 

“And the second I get a real garden,” she laughs, “I’ll probably stop making art.” 

Hey, it worked for Candide.

David Colman