Westside, Los Angeles
John Newsom & Rinus Van de Velde
John Newsom & Rinus Van de Velde
Patrick PainterPatrick Painter is pleased to present it’s Summer exhibition featuring John Newsom and Rinus Van de Velde, paired for their ambition in scale and scope. Calling attention to rare works created early in their careers, this exhibition reveals vital moments in each artists’ use of skilled techniques to challenge conventions of pictorial space. This exhibition will showcase two of Newsom’s most nuanced and compelling paintings displaying ac- tive tensions between representational painting and hard-edged abstraction. In works such as Courtly Gestures (1998), teenager-sized birds and foliage are rendered with Audubon-grade care. The hard ab- stract spheres in the background are painted last and just as tenderly as the paintings’ more nameable inhabitants, oddly seeming no less sentient. Upon closer view, surprise impasto incidents are stacked respectfully near hair-thin lines making it awesomely unclear which form is the fresher party. Courtly Gestures is just one of it’s kind. Carefully selected for this exhibition from John Newsom’s series titled ‘The Crusade Paintings’ (1997-1998), the full series consists of eight large-scale paintings depict- ing the overlapping of ancient, contemporary, and timeless motifs – deftly combined. Magnifying the natural world, Newsom explores it as an undeniably gorgeous non-democracy where the abstract and the figurative act as double agents playing both sides to stunning effect. These dualities allude at once to painting as a space that is both stable and transient, in-flux and at rest. The artist states: “I wanted something encompassing the past, present and future. The image of a sin- gle medieval weapon harkens to the past. The Pop-Modern backgrounds are a very contemporary type of depiction. The timeless worldly subjects are the birds. The birds are timeless characters within the framework of the paintings. So we see these allegories of past, present and future unfold in a grand pictorial manner.”- John Newsom lives and works in New York. John Newsom was born in 1970 in Hutchinson, Kansas. He received his BFA from The Rhode Island School of Design and MFA from New York University. Newsom has exhibited both nationally and in- ternationally. His work is included in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, Yale University Art Gallery, The Hammer Museum, The San Fransisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. Drawing together works from Rinus Van de Velde’s first solo show at Patrick Painter Inc., this exhibi- tions’ three selections focus on the artists’ fictionalized version of himself and a fictional young writer, and friend, who has gone missing. The drawings, and descriptive titles present the artists fruitless attempt to locate his friend and his isolation as he draws out the contradictory evidence left behind by his disappearance. Van de Velde’s narrative world focuses on the convergence of art historical precedent and a reinterpre- tation of the medium; one which takes on scale and form, presenting each piece as an object as well as an image. Concerned with anything but the natural, Van De Velde’s narratives belong to a planet where a changing but always subjective “I” is narrator supreme. In this reinterpretation, Van de Velde immerses himself in the space between systematic and unsystematic reality. The exploratory nature of these early works on view lends itself well to the marriage of narrative and figurative. Since his first solo show with Patrick Painter Inc., Belgian artist Rinus Van de Velde (b. 1983, Leuven) has developed a practice resulting in megalithic charcoal drawings, behind which lies an elaborate production. Whereas Van de Velde once mainly used found footage as documentation for his draw- ings, he has gradually taken a firmer control over his images.Today, the artist combines found and staged photography, audienceless performances cinematic storytelling, installations, and sculptures. These elements serve as the basis of drawings that depict a completely different world, yet also docu- ment a very real working process that takes place mainly in the studio. Rinus Van De Velde lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium.