Collection: One Thing for Another | Saul Sanchez

One Thing for Another is a series of oil paintings depicting assiettes parlantes, decorative French and English plates from the 19th century that combined images, letters, and words to create rébus: enigmatic puzzles inviting playful interpretation and decoding. I am interested in how these objects transitioned from aristocratic display cases to popular tables, and how their function expanded: from holding food to holding language, humor, and enigma. By enlarging their scale, I exaggerate their presence and question their uses: is it a plate, an image, or a riddle?

During the meal, the decoration would slowly emerge, like a secret shared among diners. Solving the message required an intimate gesture: turning the plate, revealing the back, verifying the answer. This brief play between image and word, between food and meaning, lies at the heart of this work , and extends into the way I handle meaning itself. In reproducing these plates, I tamper with their original sentences,  sometimes deliberately, sometimes intuitively, sometimes without fully knowing the result myself.

Accompanying the paintings is a wall piece composed of painted MDF forms that together render a sentence in Gregg shorthand, a stenographic system developed in the late 19th century to record spoken language quickly and discreetly, now largely forgotten. Both the rébus and Gregg shorthand share a common logic: rather than following conventional spelling, both systems organize language around the sounds of speech, translating words into image and gesture. The flowing, abstract shapes read as pure form before they read as script. The sentence reads: “This picture is a fine addition to our collection.” Written in a system few can decipher today, the statement performs its own disappearance, a judgment about value and belonging, encoded and withheld.

That tension between legibility and opacity runs through the whole exhibition. My work explores how meaning transforms and breaks down when it travels between different languages, mediums, and systems of communication. These plates, also French, also carrying codes that require deciphering, become a way of thinking about that experience, about labor, about class, about what it means to try to read a system that was not made for you. The answer, in the history of these plates, is always on the back. You have to flip the object to understand it.