206 S Ave 20, Los Angeles 90031 /info@lastprojects.org/lastprojects.org/ 323 356 4225
PATRICK JAMES DONOVAN
MAN IN A RING MOLD
April 8 thru May 7 2023
Opening Reception:
Sat April 8th 6-10pm
Man in a Ring Mold, oil on panel, 20” x 16”, shipping palette
“[a]painting is just a painting. It’s a flat surface slathered with oils, rather than an illusionistic window on the world, and there’s nothing wrong with reminding viewers with a gotcha joke.” Jason Farago [1]
Man in a Ring Mold, a premiere solo exhibition of paintings by Patrick Donovan reveals himself as a playful jester taking artifice to heart; trompe l’oeil and subject matter fuses his socio self-awareness and musings on the institutional. Donovan writes, “The self-consciousness of these paintings presents themselves as the object of reality, rather than what is represented.” Man in a Ring Mold shows an oeuvre of paintings in various styles showcasing differing techniques and forms explored by Donovan.
Shirtless men, Amazon packages, surveillance, laboring bodies, a baby wearing a VR headset, old ladies, homelessness, and 60’s inspired space age furniture are all rendered in studied representations with a palette of hues that diffuses the potentially polemic. The way a soft focus reduces sharpness, the colors of pinks, greys, light blues, yellows, and light greens transform these 21st century concerns. Man in a Ring Mold isn’t offering platitudes, instead it represents the pursuit of enjoyment in what painting can do when relational aesthetics smash into each other. What appears as a documentation of an outward curiosity also veritably defines a painter painting themselves.
The eponymous painting Man In A Ring Mold is a portrait, mounted atop a small shipping crate of a figure from the torso up with an empty bundt cake mold around their neck. With a frown this figure is not happy but their expression isn’t pained, like a grimace. The mold seems more a nuisance or momentarily upsetting in spite of there being no taking-it-off. Maybe Donovan is adding levity to corporal restraint and control—humanity’s history, including this land’s colonized horrors with slave collars and the pain it conjures—except this body is not bruised, bloodied, starved or distressed. Healthy, slim, and muscular with pecs, this body is standing and looking-up breaking the 4th wall, as if just addressed. Maybe the bundt cake mold is a fetish bondage collar with the cake having just been eaten.
Similarly, two paintings, Figure with Contrails and Two Seated Men, articulate desire; hinging the imagery between an artist working from what they know and what they want. With a mix of technique, Figure with Contrails features a shirtless man seated on a modernist designer chair with a dog resting at his feet on a plush shag carpet. Two magazines, upside down on the carpet, one atop the other, with legible covers reads left-to-right in all caps, FLEXED and BUTT. In the background sits a principled shape of antiquity, a large two-handled vessel painted loosely in black and white. A volley and interplay between proficiency and provisional becomes a tool for Donovan; a nod to his adept rendering skills. Circular green shapes implying leaves not affixed to a stem or planter dissipates into the sun-bright atmosphere of the modern interior. Across the top 1/16 of the painting, the outdoors makes its way in—the causation for the UV brightened interior—with a slivered strip of idyllic blue sky crossed with contrails and the stumps of two palm trees.
Benignly explicit, Two Seated Men shows two men cleanly and casually dressed, almost twin-like with blond hair and fair pinkish skin staring outward with unassuming smirks. Although they are seated with legs bent and their backs upright there are no chairs illustrated. It’s true that a chair must afford sitting to be a chair but does it cease to be a chair if it’s not present? This is the humor Donovan plays with; using the improbable unwaveringly. Not sneaky or hidden and in-plain-sight one man’s hand rifles inside the pants of the other. An act of pleasure with blank affectations. These fellas aren’t caught in an act rather they are familiar and casual, being and doing mechanically or as pneumatically driven figures.
The balance of leisure and fantasy between labor and reality is apparent within Man In A Ring Mold. Figures With Workers is a menagerie of symbolism in tiers. With their backside facing us the viewer, faceless laborers work on a brutalist grey concrete wall adorned with the Three Graces, a Greek ideal of beauty. The wall is pocked with spots of spackling and exposed electrical outlets alluding to a job-site in progress. In the foreground a postmenopausal woman enjoys a cell phone conversation seated with legs crossed wearing pale lime-green pants with exposed ankles and her feet encased in loafers. She is leisurely at rest while the work taking place directly behind her upholds arcane desires of robust beauty and youth. Donovan games with combinations of artistic languages that mark art historical connections and class structures.
Framing labor and art within the goings-on of an art gallery, At The Gallery conflates the roles of labor, art objects, and attendees into an infinite triangulation. Each role is depicted hierarchically with how much they are illustrated within the painted surface. The labor is primary, the art is secondary and the viewer/gallery attendee is absently tertiary. Giving precedence to the labor, a custodian is detailed and fully described with a face mask, tennis shoes, work gloves, and a uniform. A trash bin on wheels adorned with spray bottles, garbage bags, brooms and mops remains linked to the custodian within reach and touch, like a man with his hand on a gun in a duel, ready to clean. Sandwiched between the gallery attendee and custodian, the art object, a large-scale sculpture sits on display. A skewed angle of a flattened oblique torso of a man with blue jeans and a tight tucked-in yellow t-shirt poses with muscular arms raised. Tight along the right edge, a barely-there profile of a gallery attendee stands with their sight directed at the sculpture and custodian. Donovan manages to pack-in many details and identifiable characteristics onto the slivered profile: a forehead, eyes, face mask, hands clutching a to-go coffee cup with a glimmer from a bracelet along the forearm, a dangling purse, an open-toe sandal and foot, and a flowing skirt with a pattern. Blurring and considering what is on display and viewed when attending galleries and art institutions, Donovan toys with the art of labor by exchanging the focal point and expanding the perceived roles and subsequent limitations of engagement.
Referring to the paintings of framed paintings encased in thick wooden frames as “fake frame paintings,”Donovan doubles down on mimicry and caricature. Flat appliqués of gradients and shading adds dimensionality to the shadows and seams where the frame moulding conjoins. Whereas the paintings within the “fake frames” are contour drawings, fast and matter-of-fact renderings of portraits scratched-in and burrowed into thick paint. Giving detail and emphasis to the framework that contains painting Donovan turns the focus away from what is being represented; painting remains as an objective act.
Recently performing as art installer, audience, and documentarian Donovan mounts their paintings onto walls, gates, advertisements, and doorways outside and around his Los Angeles Street studio at the crossroads of Downtown and Skid Row. Calling it “Paintings in the Wild” the paintings aren’t left behind forever. Instead Donovan watches and sits with the works and has interactions with the occasional conversations that spring up. Presenting one of a kind items, paintings too precious to desert, adds volume in the streets in a city where the growing class and mental health divide fuses with commerce and daily commotions. Placing paintings outside is not a virtuous gesture. Instead this performance invites potential; interactions that otherwise never take place for Donovan or within the galleries and institutions that house Art. The public arena becomes a springboard for Donovan to expand his agility in receptivity for continued discovery and fluidity as a painter and citizen.
The visualized socio-complexities within Man In A Ring Mold emphasizes explainable and observable inequities present all around us; not as an aftermath of consumption and inequity but as a painter concurrently working in the present. Man In A Ring Mold offers a resolute desire for observation mixed with painterly play; a way to illustrate what we already see and feel all around us.
–Nilay Lawson, Artist
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/11/arts/design/cubism-met-museum-review.html New York Times, November 11, 2022
Born in Washington DC a federal district, and raised in Alexandria Virginia, once part of the federal city 160 years prior, a metropolitan region with federally funded art institutions and loads of free access. As a child through high school Donovan had an inherent skill and interest with drawing and painting and was embraced by his nuclear family coming up in the DC area. Staying on the east coast, attending college in Boston and obtaining a white collar career in Washington DC without a dedicated art practice Donovan occasionally enrolled in classes and kept up-to-date on matters regarding Art by visiting museums, galleries, private collections, and reading reviews. Donovan currently lives and works in downtown Los Angeles with an art studio walking distance from his domicile; getting into the studio twice a day with a lunch break at home in-between. This life is filled with a studious daily structure and unadulterated engagement with all things Art including attendance in group exhibitions, gallery openings, artist-run events, museum exhibitions, and studio visits and solo exhibitions. A 75 year old emerging artist, Donovan has previously shown work in Los Angeles at Blackstone Gallery, Lava Projects, the Queer Biennial 2018, SoLA Contemporary, the Los Angeles LGBT Center, and Last Projects; in Sacramento at the Crocker Art Museum; and in San Francisco at Paolo Meija Projects. His work was included in New American Painting, Pacific Coast Edition (2013). He has a BA (1971) in philosophy from Brandeis University and an MFA (2012) in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute.