Anat Ebgi is happy to current new work by Los Angeles artist Joshua Petker. The exhibition, entitled Hyacinth Canyon, is the artists’s third solo exhibition on the gallery. A gap reception might be held on Saturday, September 13, 6-8 pm.
Hyacinth Canyon names each fable and place. Taking inspiration from the Greek story of magnificence, rivalry, and metamorphosis, Petker pairs it with a whimsical California canyon the place time folds on itself. The convergence of historical past and creativeness unites Petker’s observe, which treats portray as a web site of overlapping realities. Throughout massive and medium scale canvases, layered and interlocking figures share a body, but retain a charged, separate relationship to one another. Ghostlike impressions, statuesque nudes, and wandering outlines of beasts and smiles appear directly animated and completely mounted, arrested by a pores and skin of paint. Right here Petker treats the current tense as composite: histories, jokes, and devotions convene as a simultaneous multi-subjective actuality.
Simultaneity registers as a metaphor for our instances. Courtly decorum and comedian interruption share the identical image airplane. Id and archetype behave like collage, as convergent stacks of roles that by no means settle into singularity. Need and self-discipline transfer as mutually dependent currents via these avatars of up to date ascension. Whether or not in a grand promenade portrait or a crowded tavern of layered topics, the painted floor operates like a proscenium, the place allegory, reminiscence, and revision overlap fairly than resolve.
Petker’s chromatically intense palette is a structuring system, setting the order of consideration. Ice blue, burning orange, and punctuating cadmiums direct the attention rhythmically throughout the canvas. Suggesting a form of anarchic freedom, limbs and costumes splice, silhouettes echo and contradict, outlines double again, tracing a choreography of alternate poses and time scales. Various expressions of line, shade, and rendering sit collectively; revisions, rubbings, and drips stay legible all through. Petker’s topics command this weird, but curiously credible and fertile world of the creativeness and unconscious.
Forming a lush, theatrical world the place anachronism and allegory collide, Petker mines a visible vocabulary of 18th- and Nineteenth-century European portray. Courtly apparel, powdered wigs, pastoral landscapes, and studio tableaux, are filtered via a Petker’s psychedelic lens producing figures who’re directly historic, haunted, and disassembled. Goblets, masks, laurels, tambourines, canines, and dragons alike, flow into as props in a repertory theater. Their recurrence turns iconography right into a grammar of morphability. Course of and growth, rehearsal and efficiency, interval kinds and studio cartoons, water nymph and flower youngster, share the stage to finish a imaginative and prescient of actuality. Petker reanimates artwork historical past as a medium of fantasy, introspection, and archetype, reimagining historic motifs and style towards an emotional reality.
