About the contemporary artist, Patti Oleon
My paintings are amalgams of incidents and real places dislocated in time and space, realistically rendered but on the verge of abstraction.
Patti Oleon creates paintings that not only question the conventions of landscape and architecture, but also test new possibilities in an age of digitally mediated experiences between the natural world nature and human built environments. Her paintings compositions appear to be confounding fictions, each work presenting what seems factual, yet rife with associations, ambiguities, and transmutations. She is fascinated with discovering the disquiet amid mundaneness.
The San Francisco artist paints from photographs she takes of mundane public spaces: hotel and apartment lobbies, TV and movie sets—spaces contrived to look habitable but resolutely lacking human presence. She intentionally distorts the actual physical reality in a multitude of ways, while her paintings simultaneously reference the specificity of detail and the void of the spaces. Because these contrived environments are rendered faithfully but cropped and decontextualized, they are unidentifiable, suggesting that even the most lucid presentation of facts is distorted, incomplete, provisional. The images play on the edge between realism and illusion, in that liminal space between what is known and what cannot be identified.
Oleon’s newest series of paintings references the lobbies of apartment complexes found in various sections of Los Angeles. She photographed the glassed-in lobbies from the outside and incorporated the reflections of extraneous objects on the street as superimposed over the interior imagery distorting the sense of a specific place and creating ambiguity between reality and perception. The idea of a lobby persists, rife with many associations: a waiting area, a staging area, an in-between, a nether land.
Patti Oleon received both a BA and MFA in Fine Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles, from which she graduated Phi Kappa and Summa Cum Laude. Her work has been featured and reviewed in many publications, including ArtScene, Voyage Houston, Visual Art Source, Artsy, Artnet News, Art LTD, New American Painting, The Boston Globe and The Los Angeles Times. Oleon has had numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Grant and grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, The Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant, and a Fulbright Fellowship for study in Munich, Germany and many others.
