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Mark Quint still remembers his first collaboration with Manny Farber in 1984, when Quint’s gallery was located downtown. Farber was infamous for working up to the last minute, and he finished the show’s final work about an hour before the opening.

“We hauled it upstairs, and it was still totally wet,” Quint recalled. “He had images of seafood, lobsters, mussels, and these were all things Patricia (Patterson, his wife and collaborator) had either cooked or they had bought. And before he ate them, he painted them.”

As was his practice, Farber worked on a flat, horizontal surface and would stage his paintings using tiny figures, scraps of paper, rebar, leaves, vegetables, fish and countless other everyday, mundane items. But sometimes, as he was painting, often right next to the item, a piece of something, perhaps a melon seed or a fish bone, would get caught in the paint and become part of the painting.

Quint Contemporary Art is pleased to announce the publication of Here and There, Back and Forth, the most complete survey yet of work by artist Patricia Patterson, documenting the artist’s career and recent retrospective at the California Center for the Arts in Escondido. The public is invited to a launch party for the catalogue on September 17th starting at 6pm at the gallery. The event will then proceed to D.G. Wills Books, a block from the gallery at 7461 Girard Avenue, for a discussion by writers: Sally Yard, Kent Jones, Robert Polito, Robert Walsh and Leah Ollman. Patterson will be in attendance to sign catalogues. The event will be held at Quint Contemporary Art, 7547 Girard Avenue, La Jolla, CA.
& D.G. Wills Books, 7461 Girard Avenue, La Jolla, CA

Sally Yard – Professor of art history at the University of San Diego, writer and curator.

Kent Jones – Film critic, filmmaker and programmer who lives in New York city.

Robert Polito – Director of the Graduate Writing Program at The New School in New York, writer and editor.

Robert Walsh – Writer and legal affairs editor for Vanity Fair.

Leah Ollman – Art critic for the Los Angeles Times and Art in America.

Patricia Patterson’s first retrospective, filling all 9,000 square feet of this museum, encapsulates a career nearly singular in its focus but expansive – exhilaratingly so – in its emotional range and sense of formal adventure. In 1960, as a young art student, Patterson traveled to Inishmore, one of the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland. The visceral shock of the place, rocky and treeless, without electricity or plumbing, registered deeply, as did the relationships she developed there during a dozen stays over the course of 30 years. The Aran of her memory, along with sketches and photographs, became an inexhaustible well that she has drawn from as a painter, first in New York and since 1970 in Southern California.

Her earliest works here, modest-size oils on paper from 1962, present a tenderly observed taxonomy of the island’s chief elements: piebald horse, whitewashed house, cart, haystack, man kneeling in prayer. In one of the most recent pieces, a broad landscape in casein and pastel on canvas (2011), Patterson marries poetry, the evocation of sea and sky as gray atmospheres varying in density and viscosity, and prose, the faithful description of a pair of cows, their noses to the stone-strewn ground. Because of the continuity of Patterson’s subject matter, it doesn’t matter that the 60-plus paintings are not hung chronologically (though several large installations from the ’80s are re-created more or less intact). The work forms a cohesive whole much like a photo-essay, examining multiple aspects of a theme across time through the accretion of specific stilled moments.

Like a planet subject to the gravitational pull of two different suns, Patricia Patterson was long torn between mutually exclusive sources of nourishment and attachment: the Aran Islands, off the west coast of Ireland, where she lived as a young student and returned a dozen times over the course of 30 years; and her life in the U.S., fully engaged as an artist, teacher, writer and partner to film critic and painter Manny Farber.

Ultimately, Patterson chose both, thus the title of her first retrospective exhibition, “Here and There, Back and Forth,” at the California Center for the Arts museum in Escondido (through June 30).

“It was a conundrum, something to solve,” she said, taking a break from the installation of the show last month. “It was always a kind of emotional turmoil, because I loved [Ireland] so much, and yet all my life I had so much here. I really did love the world there as much as anything I’ve ever experienced.”

La Jolla The instructional drumbeat of this show’s title—“Split, Splice, Splay, Display”—characterizes well the transparency and humor of Roman de Salvo’s best work. It describes in the most abbreviated manner the steps he takes to transform raw material (in this case, wood) into finished sculpture, and delivers the alliterative terms with a showman’s wink. De Salvo has a bit of the carnival barker’s performative flair (“It slices, it dices . . . ”) in addition to the patience and diligence of a fine craftsman.

For each of the six new pieces in this show (all 2008 or ’09), he split and segmented tree branches, recombining them into wall-mounted sections of tracery. The cut sides of the wood face out, and have been sanded so they read as smooth, continuous planes. That continuity is a coy illusion, since the spline joints (slender strips of wood inserted and glued into grooves cut into the ends of both joined pieces) that connect the sections are fully visible, and neither the grain patterns nor the width of the segments matches up precisely. De Salvo flaunts the artifice of his constructions while teasing organic-looking patterns from them. In Filter, Chinese elm branches are made to look like the veins of a giant (36-by-86-inch) double-stemmed leaf. In Delta Tissue, the slim lines of wood define a cluster of irregular rounded shapes suggestive of a cellular network or the residue of an agglomeration of bubbles.