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jeffrey palladiniunspoken connections
The Lowe GaLLeryatlanta — Los angeleswww.lowegallery.com
jeffrey palladiniunspoken connections
Jeffrey Palladini professes to, and clearly practices, a painterly formalism in which line and texture describe movements and patterns on sturdy but absorbent
surfaces. Compositional dynamics play within the picture and in the determination of its perimeter. “Independence from the stretched canvas,” writes Palladini,
regarding his use of wood panel as support, “leads me to work with irregular shapes, to cut contours, to pierce the surface plane.” For all this, however, Palladini
is no abstractionist. His work displays a thoroughly evident subject matter, as unmistakable as a billboard’s – or, perhaps better said, as a film projection’s.
Palladini’s pictorial vocabulary would once have been labeled Pop, and would have been considered for its relation to billboards and movie screens and other
support structures associated with popular culture, as well as for its stark figure-ground contrasts. But Pop imagery has itself become so ubiquitous – to the
extent where it has reshaped the very pop culture that shaped it – that we know now to look deeper, to regard Palladini’s pictures as something more than neo-Pop.
They do not merely reconsider the post-modern feedback mechanism of Pop art and pop culture, but harness that richly associative mechanism to the purposes
of narrative – or, at least, narrative incident and atmosphere.
Even without the distancing quality the decorous patterned overlays so often lend his paintings (but especially with that quality), Palladini seeks to convey a
stylized, even theatricalized acting-out of intense human emotion. Anger, pain, lust, fear, reverie, regret, and a host of other emotions and emotional states play
across his pictures, in effect enacted by the one or more human beings present therein. Interestingly, Palladini almost never relies on the faces of his men or
women to convey these passions, even when those visages – the usual repositories of expression – are in full view. Instead, he sets in motion fleeting scenes whose
overall coherence bespeaks the range of human experience: pairs embracing tenderly or hungrily, the rhythmic tensions of small groups, the spark of anticipation
or weight of worry raising or lowering a man’s back. And, in good cinematic fashion, Palladini renders these raw, basic choreographies in close-up, so that the
viewer is afforded little sensate distance.
movie kiss #2 | oil and charcoal on wood | 33 x 99 inches (three panels) | 2005
Jeffrey Palladini: THE BIG SCREENBy Peter Frank
You would be forgiven were you to think that Palladini were quoting or paraphrasing frames from a film noir classic or nouvelle vague landmark. Instead, of
course, he is “shooting” his own movies – or, rather, shooting into cinematic conventions, bringing their emotional truths and manipulations to the surface, freez-
ing them onto obdurate panels, and allowing them – now given both depth and gloss by their painterliness – to move us without benefit of story line. Palladini
does not bring us to these climactic scenes and Greek choruses through any narrative arc; if anything, he reverses such a process, positing singular incidents
from which we might devolve the narratives that led to them. Even so, the paintings are no mere film stills, but, again, renditions of human actions made visually
– and thus emotionally – vibrant with pigment, hand-drawn line, and judicious suppression of background detail.
That suppression, pointing stylistically at the cool middle-distance of Pop art, in fact is a powerful way of stimulating our empathic comprehension. By keeping
his figures stark and his backgrounds free of distraction, Palladini allows us a great deal of latitude in interpreting the apparent goings-on – actually, in formulat-
ing our own narratives. The close spatial proximity we feel to the protagonists prompts our involvement and our belief that we know reasonably well what’s going
on and perhaps even what motivates the women and men we see. Their motivations and even identities might remain mysterious, but their behavior and their
feelings in and around the moments we witness seem at least somewhat self-evident. Sex is sex, after all, loneliness is loneliness, sorrow is sorrow.
Or is it? Just because a man’s shoulders and a woman’s are bare at the time of their embrace does not guarantee that such contact is erotic. Just because a
fellow raises his hands to the back of his head does not mean he’s feeling pain. The proximity of water, for instance, may be prompting people’s actions or dress;
so might heat or nightfall or a hospital interior. The patterns Palladini frequently etches onto his images tend if anything to draw us away from the certainty of our
initial conclusions; they tempt and finally resist interpretation, and yet they insist on encumbering our search for story. Just as the backs of people’s heads are in
far greater evidence in this body of work than are their faces, embraces are common here but actual liplocks occur rarely. These and other devices and situations
– camera angles, if you will – deflect the certainty of our interpretation but only redouble the intensity of our gaze. Our curiosity, not sufficiently fulfilled, keeps us
riveted, as if something else might happen in each painting.
movie kiss #3 | oil and charcoal on wood | 49 x 66 inches (two panels) | 2006
Not only does nothing else happen in any one painting (for all their resemblance to certain types of cartoon, Palladini has not – so far at least – broken up his
panels into comic strip frames), nothing sequential happens between paintings. At most, two paintings might seem to share the same players, but not the same
events. Palladini forces us to experience his pictures as stand-alone phenomena, moments frozen not only in time and space, but in sense. At the same time, his
painterly treatment keeps them partly “un-frozen,” resistant – however stylized they may appear – to iconization; their linear suppleness, their sensuous surface,
and their peculiar palette keep Palladini’s paintings as unsettled as they are static. They nearly move, just as they nearly mean – but they don’t move, and they
mean only what you want and hope them to mean.
To his cinema in paint, Jeffrey Palladini brings only a cast and various mises en scène. The rest is up to you. “The viewer,” Marcel Duchamp opined, “completes
the work of art.” We complete Palladini’s art by allowing it to play out not just in front of our eyes, but in our minds, where its Pop-like superficiality is revealed as
a false front, a conceptual glaze that challenges our entry. There is more in Palladini’s painting than meets the eye; how much more depends on the eye.
Los AngelesDecember 2006
group #7 | oil and charcoal on wood | 49 x 73 inches | 2005
group #7 | oil and charcoal on wood | 49 x 73 inches | 2005
group #8 | oil and charcoal on wood | 49 x 65 inches | 2005
percussion/repercussion | oil and charcoal on wood | 66 x 49 inches (two panels | 2006
potential energy | oil and charcoal on wood | 66 x 49 inches (two panels) | 2006
looking up | oil and charcoal on wood | 49 x 49 inches | 2005
queue | oil and charcoal on wood | 13 x 19 inches | 2005
clavicle | oil and charcoal on wood | 13 x 19 inches | 2005 perhaps this spot right here | oil and charcoal on wood | 13 x 19 inches | 2005
supplicant | oil and charcoal on wood | 13 x 19 inches | 2005 shoulder blade | oil and charcoal on wood | 13 x 19 inches | 2005
closely behind | oil and charcoal on wood | 13 x 19 inches | 2005 grapple | oil and charcoal on wood | 13 x 19 inches | 2005
sleepers | oil and charcoal on wood | 13 x 19 inches | 2005 feigning sleep | oil and charcoal on wood | 13 x 19 inches | 2005
clutch | oil and charcoal on wood | 13 x 19 inches | 2005 crowd surge | oil and charcoal on wood | 13 x 19 inches | 2005
above/beneath | oil and charcoal on wood | 13 x 19 inches | 2005
“This suite of 12 small works was a revelation to me. The reduced
scale of the works has dramatically ramped up the intimacy of
the images, and intensified the narratives within. Everything,
from color saturation to brushwork to emotional impact, seems
to burn more brightly in these works.”
- jeffrey palladini
joe kavalier | oil and charcoal on wood | 49 x 49 inches | 2005
tangents | oil and charcoal on wood | 37 x 49 inches | 2005
glendale | oil and charcoal on wood | 65 x 33 inches | 2005
an endless succession of moments | oil and charcoal on wood | 98 x 49 inches (two panels) | 2005
Artist Jeffrey Palladini was born in 1968 in the Chicago area, and grew up in Southern
California. He studied Art at California State University, Long Beach 1986 to 1990, where he
studied a wide range of media, eventually gravitating toward drawing and painting. It wasn’t
until his studies in Florence, Italy in 1989 that he began to form a consistent creative voice. The
ubiquitous beauty of art in everyday life in Italy had a profound effect on the young artist, and
he began experimenting with combining the found objects and classical figurative imagery he
found everywhere around him. From that time, Palladini has found canvas simply too passive,
and he has continued to work almost exclusively using wood as the ground for his paintings. In
1991, Palladini relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he lives and works with his
wife, psychotherapist Theresa Hall, and daughter Lola. He continues to develop his unique
vocabulary of dramatic figurative imagery, combined with compelling linear and pattern
elements, which serve to enhance and inform the narrative of each work.
Palladini has been exhibiting his work in solo, group, and juried exhibitions since 1991. His
work is included in many private and corporate collections. He is represented by the Lowe
Gallery in Atlanta, GA and Santa Monica, CA, and by Brian Marki Fine Art in Portland, OR.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Peter Frank is Senior Curator at the Riverside Art Museum and art critic for Angeleno magazine and the L.A. Weekly. Frank has taught at
Pratt Institute, Columbia University’s School of the Arts, the Tyler School of Art, the University of California Irvine, Claremont Graduate School,
California State University Fullerton, the University of California Santa Barbara, the University of California Los Angeles, and other
institutions. His Something Else Press: An Annotated Bibliography was published by McPherson & Co. Documentex in 1983. A cycle of poems, The
Travelogues, was issued by Sun & Moon Press in 1982. Abbeville Press released New, Used & Improved, an overview of the New York art scene
co-written with Michael McKenzie, in 1987. His most recent major publication is Robert DeNiro, Sr., a monograph published by Salander-O’Reilly in 2004.
Graphic DesignBrian Herbst, MediaFive Design
PrintingChromatic, Inc., Glendale, CA
Produced by Jeffrey Palladini and the Lowe Gallery
all rights reserved, 2006
The Lowe GaLLery
Atlanta, Georgia | Santa Monica, California75 Bennett St., Space A2 | Atlanta, GA 30309 | 404.352.8114
2034 Broadway | Santa Monica, CA 90404 | 303.449.0184 www.lowegallery.com | [email protected]
www.jeffreypalladini.com [email protected]
jeffrey palladiniunspoken connections
