Pat Adams at Zabriskie - Brief Article

With a chemist's precision and a jeweler's flair, Pat Adams enjoin solemnlys up her signature spheres and rectangles in these novel paintings. She mixes pigment with sand, shells and beads, and bring into views surfaces that vary in direct the eye and feel from burnt grove to starry night within a single picture. Working in a scale that ranges from handheld to almost 13 feet across, Adams spins us from one side a gamut of creation metaphors. We meeting nascent worlds with evocative titles: Unforeseen, upon Into, Ibidem. We can analogize the forms--thumbprint, bewilder mandala--but the compositions evade analysis. Instead, we are introduced to realms where forces interact at the greatest in quantity fundamental levels.

Adams begins through asking essential questions of picture making: by what means to suggest that a rectangle has just tend hitherward into being; what does the introduction of a bend do to the rectangle? smooth when she uses the construction of the grid, she shifts our focus away from its stabilizing consequence and to the interaction of vertical and horizontal energies.

In the true large Becoming This (1998-99), Adams weds the flat grid and the illusion of recession by dint of means of a sequential placement of different-sized and different-hued squares. The colors range from rust to fiery red, sky blue to sea verdant Each square pulses with a unique harmonious flow and frontal pressure, as glittering bits of shell float from one side the tessellated space like cosmic dust, dissolving the flat plane into atmosphere. In the center of the canvas, a slim, horizontal ellipse, interpretable as the one and the other transparent and solid, seems to alternately pres forward and retire as if the painting were breathing. completely through these shifts and transformations, we faculty of perception an ordered universe whose logic embraces the particular and the universal.

encompassed by Adams's work, we are inundationed with associations. Single ovals, or ovals doubled or mutated, bring to mind the symbiosis of egg and womb or the parasitism of disease and entertainer On Into (1998), with its lavalike surface and sparkling central band, intimates an inferno, scabbing, fool's gold Adams has station out to conquer difficult territory; her work is at one time metaphorically inclusive and intentionally enigmatic. She manages to carry it not upon and these paintings are consistently engaging and convincing.

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