I've been doing more studio visits than I used to - sometimes for writing I want to do, and sometimes for the hell of it. A couple of months ago I visited Chris Pate's studio for the first time. Chris, whose work I included in Some Paintings, is one of the most underrated contemporary painters in LA.
Chris' subtly modulated 70's design-referencing abstractions have recently started incorporating more and more pictographic information ranging from his appropriated tourist souvenir scarves and vintage roadmaps to quotations from recent art history for example John Baldessari. Flyover -- Pate's current show at Chinatown-adjacent Jail Gallery -- includes Los Angeles pictured here, but the red Texas number above (my picture from the studio visit) didn't make the cut (Note: Chris has subsequently informed me that the Texas piece was in"State Line," his two-person show last year at Jail with Bill Kleiman.) Chris Pate's fusion of cartographic content and formalism grounds the transcendentalism of modernist abstraction in a net of local and historical specificities. But speaking of time and space, Saturday Nov 8th is the last day to see the show, so git on down.
"All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up."
1 comment:
Those are nice. I'll have to shag ass tomorrow and catch that show.
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