Philadelphia Weekly
October 27, 2004

by Roberta Fallon


It's a world of waking dreams at Spector this month. Local artist Randall Sellers continues to seduce with his tiny graphite-on-paper worlds of M.C. Escher-like precision and complications.

And even better are the new and larger--though still not what you'd call big--narrative figure drawings of men and women, hands touching, bodies snuggling, connected yet somehow alone and forlorn. These new works are a bold push forward, and they show the artist entering into the world of storytelling in the manner of a heartsick troubadour.
Perfectly paired with Sellers in the gallery's back space is work by Brooklyn's Matthew Fisher, in which solitary soldiers--like uniformed Robinson Crusoes--march, pick petals off daisies and paddle forlornly in an endless ocean.
Both artists are mining the romantic forlorn, an aesthetic that's hot today and whose antecedent is the pre-Raphaelites of the 1840s. Painters like Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais depicted sad-faced youths with exquisite hair and clothes. And their works, tinged with morbidity and imbued with longing for simpler times, were rejections of their contemporary world.
I'm not saying Sellers and Fisher--or Hernan Bas, Elizabeth Peyton and even Yoshitomo Nara--are consciously echoing the pre-Raphaelites. But their focus on youth, their forlorn affect and their lusting for less complicated, more truthful worlds show that the artists are working from similar impulses and creating art with echoes.
Sellers' untitled fantasy cities are like snow globes--self-contained and unreachable. Drawn in compositions that resemble flat-bottomed ovals, they float in the vast white space of the paper. A magnifying glass, like the shake of a snow globe, wakes them up for a careful viewer. But these seemingly otherworldly pieces comment on our world. It's easy to read themes of ecology and anti-industrialism into what are extremely overbuilt industrial cities where nature has to fight for a toehold.
Sellers' people, unlike the tiny cities, are giants in the landscape, and their smiles, frowns and gestures evoke a world of mystery. Nude female bathers in a river look up as if to greet someone or something coming toward them. It's not clear whether they're welcoming or worried, but their hands touch each other and form a metaphorical bond that's both familial and protective.
These maidens--echoing Botticelli's heroic Venus but nothing like her--are vulnerable and real, their imperfect bodies soft and plumply suggestive. Other scenarios are equally intriguing, like the one in which a group of men and women sit atop a car while another of their group reaches inside the car to insert (or pull out) a skull.
This is the Tyler graduate's first solo exhibit with Spector, though his work did appear in a group show at the gallery. Discovered by Shelley Spector a few years ago when he showed work at the Bean Café, Sellers was also helped by the gallery owners connections, which led to successful solo exhibits for him in Los Angeles and Boston and group shows in New York, Paris and Japan.
Four drawings purchased by the Judith Rothschild Foundation are promised to the Museum of Modern Art. It's great to see the artist's work here and to see him pushing his poetic worldview into more complex territory.
Sellers' and Fisher's worlds are not happy, nor are they horrifyingly sad. But the two artists, in passing the contemporary world through their own particular inner prisms, have produced art that asks without hectoring whether things can't be better.