Patti Oleon's artwork is featured in a new book by Barbara Maria Stafford, Ribbon of Darkness: Inferencing from the Shadowy Arts and Sciences.
"Patti Oleon’s newest series of atmospheric paintings, Neither Here Nor There, reveals a sort of secular abstruseness, the umbraged indecipherability surrounding a cryptic domesticity. Oleon presents fantastic shadow-worlds, enigmatic décor surrounded with mystifying coronas of light, or eclipsed, sunk in deep focus. In her preparatory visits to Budapest, Prague, Venice, Berlin, and Istanbul, she photographed the dim interiors of restaurants, hotel lobbies, museums, palaces, and theaters-al enveloped in silted layers of history that her paintings revisit and expose. Although these public venues often teemed with people, one would never guess it from the painted images-simultaneously scintillant and somber, transfigured and tarnished.
In a glazed window, crumbling exterior architecture palimpsestically mingles with gloomy interior detail. Creating a kind of labyrinthine carpentry, Oleon mixes, reorganizes, and welds the colliding elements into a phantasmagoric composition. As if projected onto a limbic screen, things snatched from afar appear close-up and those looming above are mirrored below. Not unlike the ancient crafting of epitomai, Olean’s “obscure objects” are the result of two basic movements, dismemberment and recomposition. But instead of mere textual recycling with its onus of derivativeness, her paintings foreground the intellectual forging of synthesis, the profound connectgion between the practices of reconceptualization and making. Far from being merely shortened reproductions of so-called primary objects, her shadowy epitome establish complex, dialectic relationships, sometimes even undermining by obscuring the apparent meaning of the primary object."
More information about the book here
