REVIEWS HOPE ATHERTON
HOPE ATHERTON
PATRICK PAINTER, LOS ANGELES
3 MARCH – 14 APRIL
The shadowy, thick and fl irtatious narrative forms in this series of
new large-scale paintings from art world It girl Hope Atherton hint
at storylines, but these mainly function as excuses for paint-driven
compositions that are less tethered to the world of objects than her
previous ef_f orts. This work represents a continuation of her interest in
skewed perspective and an obfuscated photographic sensibility, while
also indicating some laudable loosening and risk-taking. Among the
dozen or so large canvases and smaller preparatory paintings included,
the most arresting images are those like Nocturnal (all works 2007),
which straddle the realms of abstraction and fi guration in a powerful
stance of enforced fusion. The painting shows a view through the legs
of a crowd into an open space tinged with ochre light at its centre. The viewer occupies a claustrophobic, inky Butcher, 2007, oil on linen,221 x 165 cm. Photo: Fredrik
position behind the crowd that opens towards the warm centre of the pictorial space, seen as though from a Nilsen. Courtesy the artist and
child’s or pet’s point of view. At the centre of the clearing is a lone male fi gure crossing the open space. The Patrick Painter, Los Angeles
light falls full on his back, he has sensual weight and mass and mysterious purpose in his transitory occupation of
that centre. The layers of semi-transparent pigment that build up to form the legs of the crowd do not on closer
inspection support their own mass. Despite possessing a graphic coherence at a distance, the paint dissolves
up close, disintegrating into visceral, gestural abstraction. Again, at a distance, the light seems intense, but up
close it dissipates: the perspective melts away into the picture plane, the space collapses, becoming not fl at but
compressed; the light fi lters through the paint, and considerations move from form and story to process and
materials.
Butcher is a slow-burning monument to mystery in which refl ections, chimerical apparitions and phantom
objects of the quotidian all stake out their territory. A dark butcher’s shop is viewed from the street through
its refl ective shop window, a default looking-glass. Inside a worker waits, sedentary amid blocky, shadowy,
commonplace surroundings. The entire upper right quadrant of the scene is full with pink chunky forms of
heartily painted meat in a passage of veined, gestural dynamism, an abstract expressionist musculature nestled
in a fi eld of chiaroscuro. The segments of the painting are rendered not only in dif_f erent palettes but using
dif_f erent hands, variances in style dictated by compositional narrative. Black and white fl atness is the language
of shadows; colour and hefty pigment are the language of fl esh. The interior/exterior and warm/cold dualities
of Nocturnal are inverted – one looks in and the other out – but the same posture of stylistic hybridity and
the collusion of form and tone remain in ef_f ect. Atherton’s architectures and interiors are theatrical, cluing
in the viewer to both their fabulist and voyeuristic aspects. Her titles are helpful but not precious, providing
just enough information to hold people’s interest while they decipher the fi gures and spaces represented,
promising that in her canvases, just like in life, there is always something lurking in the shadows, waiting to be
noticed. Shana Nys Dambrot
one.linthree.linthree.lin ARTREVIEW
p123-137 Reviews AR May07.indd 133 3/4/07 03:40:26
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