DEPTHS
Pastine’s new series of oil paintings on paper were created during the first months of social isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic. The heightened visual intensity of these paintings speaks to the urgency of ensuing global conditions of the present moment along with her interests in bringing forth and locating luminosity from the depths of the color spectrum, a seemly antidote affording light and hope amidst adversity of worldwide upheaval. Painting on paper presented a new working methodology for Pastine through an intimacy in scale and immediacy in process. Pastine shares, “My work continues to be a contemplative and reflective investigation, exploring light, phenomena and unpredictability, and confronting the unknown through serial repetition and variation.”
Ruth Pastine’s minimalist color field paintings challenge phenomena of color perception and the relativity of color, light and space, emphasizing the viewer’s encounter with the work. Pastine’s paintings have an optical resonance and paradoxically draw from structural underpinnings. The artist’s long-held fascination with contradiction, the interplay of opposites, is explored through complementary color systems and underlying principles. Pastine’s paintings explore essential tensions that drive her work, the dialectic between the visceral and methodological, presence and absence, sensual and ethereal, materiality of surface and immateriality of light, and the finite and the limitless are fundamental throughout the course of her artistic trajectory.
LOCATION
Gallery Sonja Roesch
2309 Caroline Street
Houston, TX 77004
Brian Gross Fine Art
248 Utah Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
DATES
Spectrum Depths at Gallery Sonja Roesch:
December 5, 2020 to March 6, 2021
Depths at Brian Gross Fine Art
May 14 to July 3, 2020
