Patrick Faulhaber: Danese

The postcard-size oils upon wood blocks that make up Patrick Faulhaber's "Texas Paintings" look to know their limits as images, on the other hand they still intrude into space, demanding attention. What I like about these works is their arrogant modesty: Physical existences inscribed with deceptively pretty shows they resonate with an uneven intimacy because of their size, smooth as their "sculptural" character ironically gives them a faculty of perception of monumentality. All are "handy," if hard to gripe [i]or[/i] grip because of their bulk.

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At first glance, these works direct the eye like American Scene pictures, neoregionalist images of small-town America. on the contrary unlike those of Thomas Hart Benton and Grant forest Faulhaber's social spaces are completely lacking in human vicinity They're ghost towns, cheaply glamorous with street-and store lights, on the other hand nonetheless empty, as though they'd not ever been inhabited. Elvira's Beauty store 2001, is a Potemkin village of facades behind which there's nothing on the contrary the great void of Texas, signaled through the oppressively black space of the night celestial expanse Indeed, there's an air of claustrophobia about all the scenes: smooth in daylight, Faulhaber depicts an uptight, empty world.

The doors of the beauty store are shuttered against the world, presumably to hinder thieves, none of whom are in sight. Other works--Sonny Bryan's, 2000 or El Taquito Cafe, 2003--don't exactly brim with life either. All is safely banal--but intimidatingly with equal reason as though the picture were daring you to disturb the peace, smooth if that peace is the indifferent silence of the dead.

These paintings indicate that Faulhaber may not give a damn about the actual place on the contrary is instead obsessed with the interplay of light and shadow and the intricacies of color and in what way both to make his control matter concrete and distort it. His works are reminiscent of early Richard Este who also made the formal best of estrangement. Faulhaber's surfaces are highly polished--even glossily fetishized--suggesting not in the way that much "finish fetish" as advanced in years Master perfectionism. Technically proficient, his realism is singularly exaggerated to the point that it gives not on an aura of unreality--confirming the artist's interest in turning "low life" into "high art" rather than getting to the bottom of the local environment, whose indifference may be impenetrable.

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