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What is particularly striking about Oleon's work is the way she manipulates light. Her paintings are suffused with a luminous quality that seems to emanate from within the spaces themselves.
This light, often soft and diffuse, enhances the ethereal atmosphere of her work. It is as if the scenes she depicts are bathed in the glow of memory, a light that both reveals and obscures, offering glimpses of the past while keeping certain details just out of reach.
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L.A. Apartment Lobby Yellow and Blue
oil on wood panel
30 x 24 x 1.5 inches
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Our recollections are rarely perfect; they are fragmented, often blurred at the edges, shaped as much by our present experiences as by the past itself.
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The absence of human figures in Oleon's work further heightens this sense of ambiguity.
The spaces she depicts—apartment lobbies, ornate ballrooms, forgotten rooms—are eerily empty, as if the people who once inhabited them have long since departed, leaving behind only the faintest traces of their presence. This emptiness creates a sense of longing, a feeling of something lost, yet it also allows the viewer to project their own memories and emotions onto the scene, to imagine their own stories unfolding within these spaces.
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Oleon's meticulous attention to detail and her ability to render light with an almost ethereal quality breathe life into these seemingly mundane environments, transforming them into spaces that evoke nostalgia, mystery, and a sense of the uncanny.
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In many ways, Oleon's paintings can be seen as meditations on the passage of time. They are places where past and present merge, where memories linger, suspended in time. Yet, there is a timelessness to her work, a sense that these spaces exist outside of the temporal constraints that govern our everyday lives.
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Patti Oleon's work challenges us to look beyond the surface of what we see, to delve deeper into the shadows of our own memories, and to question the nature of reality itself.
Her paintings are not just visual experiences; they are journeys into the recesses of the mind, explorations of the spaces that exist between reality and imagination. In this way, her work resonates on a deeply personal level, reminding us that our perceptions are always colored by the lens of memory, that the past is never truly past, but always present in our minds. As we stand before Oleon's paintings, we are reminded of the power of art to evoke the ineffable, to capture the fleeting and the elusive, to hold a mirror up to our own experiences and invite us to see the world—and ourselves—in a new light.
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