About

In a negotiation of two languages, Patterson combines carefully rendered oil portraits with passages of abstract painting as a means of generating a binary – and mutual – existence between the two contrasting languages of figuration and abstraction. These “masks” of abstract paint literally anatomize - or frame - the figure beneath, and in doing so also act as a conceptual acknowledgment of the inherent voyeurism of painting.

The current of references that runs through this new body of work draws from Patterson’s own personal archive as well as cultural examples of mythic self-transcendence. …