Ruth Pastine Ethereal Material, contemporary art, oil painter, minimalist

ETHEREAL MATERIAL

Ace Gallery Beverly Hills presents Ethereal Material, an exhibition of selected paintings and works on paper by Southern California-based artist Ruth Pastine. Pastine’s minimalist works address phenomena of color perception and color relativity—the perception of influence between adjacent colors, and emphasize the viewer’s encounter with the painting. In seamless gradients, often composed with nuanced admixtures of complementary hues, Pastine’s surfaces appear to pulse toward their edges. Ruth Pastine: Ethereal Material was concurrently on view with Gary Lang: Rising from September 10 to November 26, 2016, and the curated solo exhibitions to formally close Ace Gallery’s Beverly Hills location, which opened in 2003 with the inaugural exhibition Sam Francis’ Edge Series.

Art critic and historian Donald Kuspit writes: “however famously ‘impalpable’ Pastine’s perfectionist paintings have been said to be—as though the complementary colors have been miraculously distilled into sublime unity, atmospherically diffusing them so that they become ungraspable—they are inherently contradictory. Their difference may be minimalized, but the tension between them works aesthetic magic. It subliminally—and sometimes self-evidently—remains, suggesting that their unity is in conceptual fact impossible however perceptually suggested.”

Art writer Peter Frank observes: “Ruth Pastine … achieves a persuasive intensity in her paintings by approaching them with physical and intellectual fervor. … The work, after all, must seem to ‘happen’ before the viewer’s eyes even as it must seem to have always existed. As immaterial as they are, Pastine’s paintings are the realest things we can see.”