feAture Seb Patane
first exhibition in Italy earlier this year was a photograph of Luigi Bobbio,
one of the founders of Lotta Continua, the extreme-left movement of
the late 1960s and 70s. Patane enlarged the image of Bobbio, flanked
by policemen, and added a thin strip of tape that obscured his eyes.
It was a simple gesture, striking as art but deliberately ineffectual as
censorship. In his drawings (though he doesn’t really think of the activity
as such) Patane embellishes a range of photographic imagery, usually
sourced from the medium’s infancy and often depicting forgotten
actresses found in old theatre weeklies such as the Sketch. His
process is to obscure his subjects’ faces by adding blobs of ink that he
sometimes teases around the edges into hairy tendrils or feathers, as if
the beings were demonic or possessed. This is not done as a gesture
of defacement – the results are sometimes mistaken for a Chapman
Brothers-esque provocation – but as a kind of rehabilitation. “I guess
I believe in the idea that an image can go beyond the meaning that
we originally give it, that it can have a second or even a third meaning
according to the person’s sensibility and their level of interaction.”
Through these images, Patane also dabbles in a type of abstraction
that, of course, might be regarded as another kind of magic, a means of
channelling energies and conjuring states and emotions decipherable
to a privileged few.
There are works on paper in his show at Tate Britain, but the
focus, along with the sound piece, is a video of a young man juggling
fire, another kind of drawing in a darkened space. “You know, at any
festival there’s always a bunch of people juggling fire,” he says. “They
annoy me in a way. But I’ve always been quite fascinated by them at
the same time. Why do they do it? It’s really quite beautiful. I like the
idea of these people, kids usually, believing that they might challenge
“I don’t deny that
authority by introducing this very tribal, performative element.”
What seems important here, as everywhere in Patane’s work,
is the sense of delay, of anticipation that builds with each revolution.
sometimes the
Implicit is a commentary about the difficulties of finding pleasure in
political and historical imagery, and presenting the results of lengthy
research in aesthetic form. Tacitly acknowledged is the fact that art,
attraction is pretty
as accentuated by a tightly ordered system of gallery display, forever
anticipates or succeeds the explosive moment. In Patane’s hands, this
state becomes hypnotic.
straightforward”

Art Now: Seb Patane is at Tate Britain, London, until 13 January.
See Listings, page 118, for further information
Works
(In order of appearance)
Kollapsing New People (detail), 2006
2 inkjet prints on paper, record sleeve, framed digital c-type print,
inkjet print on canvas, digital c-type print, wood, Mdf, speakers, sound
dimensions variable
Razzia, 2006
pressed flowers on printed paper
21 x 28 cm
Live in Pankow, 2007
inkjet print on canvas (82 x 120 cm)
loudspeaker (10 cm diameter) mounted on Mdf
(100 x 170 x 2 cm approximately)
courtesy Maureen paley, London, and rec., Berlin
Kollapsing New People (detail), 2006
2 inkjet prints on paper, record sleeve, framed digital c-type print,
inkjet print on canvas, digital c-type print, wood, Mdf, speakers, sound
dimensions variable.
all images courtesy Maureen paley, London
63 Artreview
Seb Patane.indd 63 2/11/07 14:07:11
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