patrick chamberlain: on your mark

8/7/2019 Patrick Chamberlain: On Your Mark

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On Your Mark

Patrick

Chamberlain


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PRESENTS

PatrickChamberlain


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OnYourMarkForeward

by Liza Statton

Unblocked

by Jeremy Sigler

The Body of

Patrick Chamberlain

by Liza Statton

Plates

From the exhibition

Acknowledgments

Artist Biographies

Credits

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4

7

16

28

29

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Foreward

Patrick Chamberlain made his mark at the age o 3. I scribbled with a yellow crayon

on a screen doorThat was it. Whether this gesture was simply a reaction or an

intuitive response to the world around him, Chamberlains early expression has served

as a touchstone or the artist, who only ully returned to painting in recent years. Long

hidden rom view in various nooks and crannies o his basement studio, the work in On

Your Mark invites viewers to experience painting anew through the eyes o a antastic

colorist with a det hand.

I am grateul to Patrick Chamberlain or his incredible generosity and good nature.

Our many studio visits allowed or engaging conversations that have become all too

inrequent nowadays. His amily and riends are equally supportive and kind. Jessica

and Charlie were always encouraging and welcoming hosts; Jock Reynolds and

Jennier Gross provided motivation; and poet Jeremy Sigler, Chamberlains long-time

riend, kindly contributed a text that captures the untold spirit o Chamberlains work

to this catalogue.

Thank you to the Artspace Board o Directors or its invaluable support, and my

colleagues Laura Marsh and Courtney McCarroll or their help with this antastic

exhibition.

Liza Statton

Curator


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fully Hokusai, 2007

Oil on canvas


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Untitled (Detail)

Oil on canvas

I ollowed Patrick Chamberlain down to his basement and he fipped on the lights.

I was looking at a wide range o works; some on the foor laying fat, drips o paint

drooling over their edges and running down vertically, or in storage racks resting like

bats, upside down, or leaning against the walls like bouncers outside crooner bars;

some aggressive, others quaint; some probing and all mixed up in lunacy, others

reasonable. It would sound insulting to blurt this into the live mic, so Ill whisper it:

the paintings belong in the basement.

This is not to say that they wouldnt be welcome above ground in either the brightest

o galleries or coziest o living rooms. Its just that they belong in the basement. They

seem to be bred rom a notion o the sub. The gut longing and indulging in the lost

art o introspection. They wrestle with the urge to explore. They lose their way on

purpose. Disoriented in the waves, exploring the caves, they ollow the bubble as it

bulges rom the rim o nostril. In this way, they intrigue.

Patrick Chamberlain Unblocked

by Jeremy Sigler


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A jigsaw puzzle in progress, my daughter and I pass the time, but in Chamberlains

work there is no partner, only an unraveling, Bacon-esque mystery the animation o

technique, an excavation to the stillness o an inner dialogue, the grappling with ones

dormant Popeye. A Popeye willing to ace the paint, to mirror mentality, to get giddy,

sloppy, or tuck in, simmer down. Havoc.

In the crepuscular light edges in a sharp contrast a compressed, greedy geometry

o rays. Clashing disparate patterns implode to moti. An expanselike landscape, or

maybe a vase ull o fowers, an observed or imagined interior at a one-legged table, a

Matisse-like shbowl, like an eyeball in a coke bottle. Chamberlain is a proper descen-

dent o Hans Homann, with a like-minded instinct or pure, juicy color and just-as-juicy

gesture. Hes a guesser o geometry, an interlocker o language, a smith o visual puns

the rectilinear canvas can be fipped any which way on the easel to create a vertigi-

nous abstraction.

Chamberlain is in some ways making up or lost time. First there was philosophy, and

then a private psychology practice in New Haven, at which time, in his own analysis, he

was able to peel back a view, become unblocked. Floodgates were down, drive was way

up, the past beamed like brights into the tangle o memories like diamonds rolled out

as dice onto sot beds o black moss. The inchoate fickers o childhood: A YELLOW

CRAYON RUBBED ACROSS A SCREEN DOOR; rolling down a hill in a barrel;

standing at the neighbors door with a Watchtower pamphlet in hand; the rst painting,

o an egg, made under the watchul eye o his mentor, Brother Claw; the discovery that

his ather-by-birth, a bit rocky, had in act been a painter o nautical scenes, o an ocean

that would stand up like the sea really does when it has something to say and somewhere

else to be.

These dreamy hints disturbed adult lie, rose up in the canyon, brought end to the

drought. Now umbrellas pop like bongos or patter. This is the curiosity, the novel

vocation, quick to get legit both matter o act and a page-fipping ction. Mental,

but still intestinal. Still and spill ater spill. Paintings: they stumble into one another

in the crowded waiting room. I Chamberlain stops, the experiment could lose momen-

tum, bottleneck, a train wreck clot.

So its ast and urious, each opportunity seized to close the door, to gravitate to the

damp underneathiness where a urnace room gurgles, where wet takes wet by the hand,

where fipper-fappering compositions go with the undertow and then get spat out in the

corpsea where the dead get the gaze and maybe a bit more, resuscitated, pushed a

bit urther; where painting is not just used to invent new neurons, but also employed to

block up the backboard where fat tennis balls sit in unsatisactory summers o the past;

to obscure alse hopes, duct tape wistul antasies, gag them so the pragmatic brush can

think its way across a smear and slop up another silky panty o painterly. The work then

pulsates with the true scars and scabs o try-anything.


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Education, ater all, is wasted on the young. And manual labor on the old. Ive seen

men in their ties throw a ball around with ar more fare than their teenage sons.

We arent ready to learn till were ancient, till weve earned our lessons and leveled

with the honest ear. Condence builds to a breaker at the shore where nothing is

there to lose but the glorious swell. Time then tubing over itsel, the chin jams the

ramping shore. We may not be ready to love, either, till middle age, when the heart

begins to bulge like a pomegranate and the nerves dull like useless re crackers,

when love becomes the act o doing anything beyond nothing. This is when the mind

and body nally all or one another in the dark shiver o mortality. This is when we

take solitude to be great company, the ultimate conversationalist voices in the

slow wind unwind the clock.

And the other humans? They are ecstasy, along with a bottle o Malbec, a pot o sh

soup, resh cilantro heaped on a winter night, the moons elegant toga tied at the

plunging horizon.

But the painter must then delve back in, descend again to the guess-work o his greasy

brushes with their oh-so temperamental bristles paint tubes yes-ing or no-ing to

rapid-re interrogation. Unblocking, unblocking. Even while blocking in the next

canvas.


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To experience the paintings o Patrick Chamberlain is to eel human. As you enter the

pewter-gray gallery at Artspace, Chamberlains radiant abstract paintings airly burstrom the walls, pulsating with colors that command attention. Feverish reds, turquoise

blues, brilliant yellows, and famingo pinks punctuate his canvases, arresting your gaze.

The exuberant colors draw you into the darkened room where the artists pictures oer

moments o amusement, ease, agitation, desire, and desperation a small sampling o

the human emotional spectrum.

Ranging in scale rom the small to the grand, Chamberlains robust abstractions serve

as a visual palliative to viewers in a time o pervasive anxiety. Unrelenting economic

and environmental crises and 24/7 news cycles shape our daily existence. Somehow,

Chamberlains quirky panoply o colors and orms overwhelm yet engage. Perhaps it isthe Technicolor quality o the canvases that enchants and ensnares us. Almost willully,

the paintings manage to divert and distract our eyes rom the illuminated electronic

screens and gadgets that increasingly enslave us to virtual reality. In this way, Cham-

berlains work manages to unplug our web-surng minds, allowing us to ocus, just

or a moment, on the here and now. Rearming the validity o human experience in

the midst o a technologically determined age lies at the core o Chamberlains artistic

practiceone that relies on the primacy and physical sensation o intuition to capture

the essences o objects, nature, and people.

Isolate Flecks (Detail)

Oil on canvas

The Body of Patrick Chamberlain

by Liza Statton


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The diculty and enjoyment o looking at

Chamberlains work comes rom the artists

method o painting, which is neither purely

abstract nor wholly gural. fully Hokusai (2

(g. i) and Perhaps a Garden (1997 - 2004

ii), or example, are two works that allude t

presence o the natural landscape, yet rera

ully describing it. In fully Hokusai (2007), areas o gray and green hem in the arcing g

strokes o reddish orange and icy blue that o

whelm the canvas. The artists separate gest

appear to coalesce into one, which reads as

powerul, cresting wave akin to those depict

the 19th century Japanese ukiyo-e printmak

Hokusai.

Chamberlain makes similar allusions to plac

in Perhaps a Garden (2004). The structure his composition appears classically arrange

our eyes perceive oreground, middle ground

and background. Zippy strokes and skeins o

evergreen and moss interrupt the opposing s

swathes, and patches o yellows and violets

dominate the canvas, creating a palpable te

I the picture conjures mental impressions o

elds in Provence or an English country gar

so be it. The artist neither denies nor arm

associations; he simply invites viewers into aspace through subtle gestures that unction,

literary sense, like phrases rather than sente

In this way, Chamberlains works reveal onl

to withhold. His works oer a glimpse, or so

thing beyond measure as Willem de Kooning

once remarked, that speaks to the artists ob

tions and refections within his own experien

Provoking a bodily response in the viewer is

gral to Chamberlains work, as his paintingsvery much about the body. The ten works ex

ited in On Your Mark, which vary in scale, c

composition and texture, reveal ormal meth

developed by the artist that wrestle with pai

storied legacy o expressionism and objectiv

that has existed throughout its history.g. ii. Perhaps a Garden, 1997 - 2004

Oil on canvas

g i. fully Hokusai, 2007

Oil on canvas


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Like Vincent Van Gogh, Henri Matisse, Hans Homann, Helen Frankenthaler, Frank

Stella, and Elizabeth Murray among others beore him who plumbed the depths o

reality to behold the abstract, Chamberlain conronts paintings inherent paradox:

it is both an illusion and a physical thing. Chamberlains grammar o marks and motis

is a visual response to a series o conficts embedded within his pictures between

abstraction and guration, absence and presence, illusion and reality, and repression

and reedom. For Chamberlain, such juxtapositions relate to human, bodily experi-

ences those which have no verbal equivalents that the artist represents on the

canvas.

Isolate Flecks (2010)(g. iii), an expansive twelve-panel painting, conronts your gaze

as you enter the gallery. The uniormly-sized canvases sprawl across one long wall,

appearing like musical notes on a stave. A ngers width separates one ascending and

then descending panel rom another, and while the works connect visually, they do not

physically. The spaces between the panels act grammatically, like commas that sepa-

rate yet connect a string o objects and ideas together. Chamberlain strikes a balance

between continuity and interruption through his use o a bold, contiguous contour line

that denes an expansive cocoon-like orm spanning many o the panels.

Chamberlain hints at lie contained within this worm-like shape through his rendering

o hal-amiliar orms resembling a pelvis, breast, shoulder, buttock, thigh, neck, and

even an eye socket. We sense the presence o the body through intuition rather than

overt representation, yet Chamberlains use o articial, high-key colors restrains us

rom actually seeing the body as we want or know. The vertical striping urther alludes

to the optical games aoot in Chamberlains work. On the one hand, the stripes serve as

g. iii. Isolate Flecks, 2010

Oil on canvas


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Like Williams Elsie, Chamberlains Isolate Flecks (2010) embodies confict and

repression. Williams language reveals the intimacy and distance with which he

beholds his subject. Chamberlain juxtaposes abstraction with guration and objectivity

with expression to convey a similar tension between the sensual and mental experienc-es o living in the body. In the painting, the cocoon-like orm is an organic container

or body parts that are neither ully ormed nor connected. Areas o transparent color

contrast with opaque patches o paint, and the alternating densities o color suggest

expressive states o being, ranging rom the exalted to the depressed.

I Isolate Flecks (2010) conceptually embodies the conficts inherent in our own

physical existence, it also provides us with the pictorial elements and devices that

Chamberlain repeatedly employs to convey such tensions. Elliptical and ovoid orms

appear in seven o the paintings twelve panels, including the rst and the last. At

times, the egg-like orm is legible and explicit, as in For Leo (2007-08) (g. iv) andOOF Vert (2008)(g. v), and at others, less so, as in fully Hokusai (2007). For

Chamberlain, the egg orms oten serve as the subjects and objects o his pictures,

and their presence is symbolic.

In For Leo (2007-08), the olive-like mass hovers against a semi-transparent, pastel

yellow-colored background. A similarly shaped small, red orm appears above the

ellipse, balancing between two geometric planes. These egg-like shapes, metaphors or

the possibilities o the unormed lie within, are equally constrained by their physical

g. iv. For Leo, 2007 08

Oil on canvas


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surroundings. The gray, pseudo-architectural setting in which the ovoids appear, serves

as a physical barrier to the orms potential and eventual expansion.

As with Isolate Flecks (2010), in For Leo (2007-08), Chamberlain is invested in rendering

the world as he experiences it, rather than as he sees it. In this way, Chamberlains work

connects to the generative ideas o pictorial construction as revealed by Paul Czanne,

whose works were later interpreted by twentieth century French phenomenological

philosopher, Maurice Merlau-Ponty. Rejecting the Impressionists technique o recordingthe temporary sensations o their experience, Czanne attempted to render the processes

o how we interpret these sensations visually.v

Czannes use o aceting was one such

technique that describes pictorially how we perceive our environment. And, while

Czannes paintings are both the product o vision and about vision, he never ully

relinquished using recognizable objects and orms to demonstrate his point.

For Merlau-Ponty, Czanne embodied the interdependent nature o human existence:

art, artist, and the artists lie are interconnectedeach aspect explains the other, and

the others explain each in turn.vi

Czanne, too, believed in the symbiotic relationship

between logic and intuition and vision and perception.vii

His paintings argue that suchoppositional orces cannot be separated, and his work is oten a depiction o the tension

between the two.

Czanne chose to render the processes by which we perceive reality through his use o

dynamic orm. In his humble still-lies, numerous views o Aix and LEstaque, and

introspective, alienated bathers, Czanne sought to explore and exploit the structural

mechanisms o line, space, and volume, creating pictures that, as poet Rainer Maria

Rilke once remarked, achieve the conviction and substantiality o things.viii

The tension Czanne created in his pictures derives in part rom his use o use o fatplanes and their arrangement within the picture plane. In many o his still-lies, Czanne

distorted the scale o his objects. For example, objects in the oreground appeared smaller

or more compressed against the enlarged objects in the background an inversion o the

Renaissance compositional technique o rendering illusionistic depth through linear

perspective. Czannes use o vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines reveals the construc-

tion o space in his pictures, while creating a juxtaposition between dynamism (diagonal

lines) and stasis (horizontal lines).ix

Despite his colorist bravado, Chamberlain adopts Czannes reductivist approach to

painting. In On Your Mark, works such as For Leo (2007), Untitled (2008), and Bar none(2008) reveal the artists interest in the construction o space and its pictorial eects. In

Untitled (2008), Chamberlain creates a palpable tension between notions o expansion

and contraction through his use o vertical and diagonal lines, which extend upward and

outward. He situates the ovoid orms between two contrasting vertical planes o color,

whose seemingly transparent hues contrast with the darkness and solidity o the elliptical

orms.


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g. vi. Untitled, 2008

Oil on canvas

g. v. OOF Vert, 2008

Oil on canvas


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While an emphasis on fatness permeates these pictures, reminding us that the canvas

is simply a repository or shapes and colors, Chamberlain alludes to spaces and places

beyond what we see. His conscious use o borders, visible in paintings such as For Leo

(2007), Untitled (2008), and Bar none (2008), assume an architectural unction. The

rames read as both thresholds and enclosures; they denote areas or open passage and

the potential or movement, yet simultaneously deny such possibilities.

In this way, Chamberlains minimal pictorial constructions are deceptively complexand contradictory in nature. He rejects mathematical, geometric abstraction, yet does

not ully embrace guration. Suggestions o movement, introduced by line and gesture,

are denied by the presence o static volumetric orms, ushering orth a visual confict

between solidity and insubstantiality. And, while the canvas may oten serve as an

arena or confict and conrontation or Chamberlain, it is also a physical expression o

empathy.x

Through his selection and application o color to the canvas, Chamberlain

relates the emotive disjunctions and connections to a lie lived; he leaves it up to us to

navigate the experiences o his world.

iWillem De Kooning, What Abstract Art Means to Me, (1951) in Theories of Modern Art: A Source

Book by Artists and Critics, ed. Herschel B. Chipp (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University o Caliornia

Press, 1968), 556-561.ii

Stephen Tapscott, American Beauty: William Carlos Williams and the Modernist Whitman (New

York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 5.iii

Ibid.iv

Ibid.vTaylor Carmon and Mark B.N. Hansen, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Merlau-Ponty(Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2005), 294-5.vi

Ibid.vii

Emile Bernard and Paul Czanne, Une Conversation avec Czanne, (June 1921) in Chipp, 13.viii

Rainer Maria Rilke rom Letters on Czanne, in Art in Theory, 1900-2000: an anthology of

changing ideas, eds., Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxord: Wiley-Blackwell, 1992), 37.ix

Erle Loran, Czannes Composition: analysis of his form with diagrams and photographs of his motifs

(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University o Caliornia Press, 1963), 41.x

See Hans Homann, Search or the Real and Other Essays by Hans Homann in Chipp, 540.


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Platesrom the exhibition


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Little Pink Guy, 2009

Oil on canvas


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For Elizabeth, 2007

Oil on canvas


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For Leo, 2007

Oil on canvas


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The One Right Next to For Leo, 2009

Oil on canvas


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Perhaps a Garden, 1997 2004

Oil on canvas


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For Heizer, Judd and Hirst, 2007

Oil on canvas


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fully Hokusai, 2007

Oil on canvas


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Untitled, 2008

Oil on canvas


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Untitled, 2008

Oil on canvas


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Installation view

Isolate Flecks, 2010

Oil on canvas


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Artist Acknowledgments:

I want to thank Liza Statton or many pleasurable and inspiring studio conversations. She

masterully curated a show both coherent and accessible while preserving the complexity and

open quality o my work. I am ortunate that my rst solo exhibition was in the hands o so

sensitive and judicious a curator. Many thanks to Artspace and its Board o Directors or

supporting her work and my exhibition.

I thank Proessor Kay Bonathan or giving me a ormal vocabulary and Proessor Mowry

Baden or providing a conceptual oundation under my practice. My deepest gratitude to

Jessica Stockholder whose work convinced me, some twenty-ve years ago, o the power and

importance o the artistic lie, and whose subsequent presence, and as Jerry Salz put it

modest courage, has been a challenge, support and an inspiration or more than twenty

years.

Happy Flower Painting for Georgia OKeeffe, 1997

Oil on canvas


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A50 Orange Street N H C ctic t 06510

patrick chamberlain: on your mark

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