Richard Patterson at James Cohan - Brief Article

Richard Patterson was a pleasant surprise for those of us who first saw his art in "Sensation" at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. In that exhibition, whose whirl knob overall seemed stuck upon 13, Patterson's large-scale, woozy-making paintings were not suffocate in watered out, and they looked significantly better face-to-face than in catalogue reproductions. Timed to coincide with "Sensation," his first solo present to view in New York featured works from 1999 that further displayed his considerable talents, on the contrary also revealed some limitations.

Patterson's MO is simple to describe: tiny toy figures--in this exhibit they were soldiers--are thickly slathered in multicolored paint and photographed against various backgrounds. The artist then paints direct enlargements, preserving the photograph's shallow profundity of field. This leaves large portions of the painting dizzyingly on the outside of focus, while other areas are accentuated with crisper renderings. In the extreme point the paintings resemble some bastard child of Richter and Rosenquist, level as Patterson's toy soldiers emphasize the laddishness of his cast which was evident in his 1995 Motorcrosser II painting from "Sensation." Finally, he lifts the titles from homage movies like If and The Last Detail, and from David Bowie lyrics ("Floating in a greatest in quantity peculiar way") as if to alert us that his work is firmly lower parted in pop culture. While all those ingredients appear to be right on target, none of that would matter if the paintings were not for a like reason captivating to the eye.

In the ironically titled Male exposed a rifle-toting figure, frosted in swirls of pink, purple r and white, stands against a reaching far down richly atmospheric blue. Seen from above, the figure's material substance is so far out of focus as to become a near-total stain Our warrior's overtly phallic helmet is clearer, on the other hand the only passage that is with truth in sharp focus is the fire-arm which points 'out and downward, as if he were shooting at our feet We diocese licks of gooey paint in floral tones that feminize and sensualize the weapon while contradictorily prompting us to read it as a next to the first phallus, exposed and dripping ooze

The greatest in quantity seductive painting, If, shows a soldier lathered in r white and amethystine muck lurching away from us toward an image of elderly Times Square, all vintage marquees and romantic city lights. It is hard not to diocese this as a self-portrait made upon the eve of the artist's U first appearance as if he were ready to take America by means of storm. Viewed together, the 10 works looked a touch formulaic and overcalculated. on the other hand the amount of fun they generate individually compensates for that repetition while also indicating that Patterson may be capable of plenteous more.

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