Patti OLEON works from photos she takes in public spaces (lobbies, etc) contrived to look habitable, but empty of human presence. She digitally manipulates her photographs, creating a composite image that she then makes the painting from. Her paintings are faithful renditions of that final worked image, painted in a traditional manner in oil, but clearly derived from a camera. Oleon is interested in presenting realistically rendered spaces while simultaneously creating and undermining expectations of what these environments are. She achieves this by warping perspective and shifting perceptions through the utilization of overlays of digitally altered renditions of the same scene, and by the dramatic use of light to illuminate sections of the space. The results blur the viewer’s comprehension of the relationships within the space. Oleon’s successive reprocessing and layering of the original setting culminates in her paintings presenting what appears to be factual, but which is in fact fictional and confounding. The paintings are an amalgam of things, a real place dislocated in time and space, realistically rendered but on the verge of abstraction.
Modernism is proud to present its eighth one-person exhibition of paintings by Patti OLEON. Oleon received both her B.A. and M.F.A from UCLA, from which she graduated Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude. She has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including the Guggenheim Foundation, Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant (twice), the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant, Fulbright/DAAD Fellowship, Ford Foundation Grant, and an Ingram Merrill Foundation Grant.
