Ruth Pastine

Gallery Affiliations: Brian Gross Fine Art, Edward Cella Art + Architecture, Scott White Contemporary Art, Gallery Sonja Roesch, Peter Blake Gallery

Region: Pacific Coast

Equivalence

My work is rooted in the perceptual experience of color, light, and temperature. The paintings optically expand, contract, and shift with natural light and the eye's adjustment to visual phenomena. My focus in the studio is to manipulate and challenge the physical potential and materiality of paint, to realize the immaterial. The rigorous principles and methodology that structure my painting process evolve through the expansive nature of painting.

I limit myself to complementary color systems. The color pairings of Red-Green, Blue-Orange, and Yellow-Violet represent the threshold of my palette and provide a gateway for departure, an access to endless possibility. Restrictions enable my exploration to make boundless, that which seems finite. Limiting my palette to such color pairings drives the potential of nameless color incidents within set parameters. Within the scope of a chosen palette my investigation explores the physical, retinal, and visceral phenomena of color and light.

Conceptually I am working on dissolving preconceived notions about color by shifting warm and cool perceptual experiences. I infuse the surface with subtle color systems as a means of reconciling differences and shifting color identities, revealing sameness, difference and equivalence. This process evolved White, Gray, and Saturated temperature paintings, which extend the constancy and temporality of the dominant complementary color systems.

The paintings, though visually seamless, are constructed of thousands of small daubs of paint. Working the entirety of the painting wet into wet, enables all layers to resolve the many complex color transitions as a textureless skin. The active surfaces track the inflection of the painting process and exhibit that the truth of perceptual experience reveals itself in time.