The oil paintings of Patti OLEON are highly representational depictions of period interiors, gathered during recent travels to Budapest, Prague, Venice, Berlin, and Istanbul, yet, like a stage set before the opening of a play, these interiors are resolutely devoid of human habitation. Highly detailed, yet unfamiliar and unplaceable, her depictions of interiors incorporate the distortions resulting from photo-documentation with a hand-held camera, using available light, and shallow depth of field. She composes structures and intersections of light and form from sections of these spaces, and then faithfully paints, using old master techniques, what the camera records, including any oddities of reflected light, seeking the edge between realism and illusion, the tension between the known and the unidentifiable. Pervasive warm light creates an ambiguous, sensuous skin that contradicts the motionless, powerful void. The entire room becomes a still life, with a relationship between time and image echoing a Proustian sensibility.
Oleon’s paintings unsettle us, and yet sustain our interest . . . Opera upsets reality by symmetrically perfecting it, achieving an ideal in décor at the expense of habitability. We literally do not know where we stand relative to the image. The more that we accept what our eyes see, the more that our bodies feel ghostly.
Modernism is proud to present its seventh one-person exhibition of paintings 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.
