Patti Oleon, Tomorrow Looks Like Yesterday

Patti Oleon
Tomorrow Looks Like Yesterday
April 20 - May 25, 2024

Opening Reception:
Saturday, April 20th, 5–7pm

Lowell Ryan Projects is pleased to present a solo exhibition by San Francisco-based artist Patti Oleon titled Tomorrow Looks Like Yesterday. The exhibition features eight oil paintings created over the course of the last year that depict windows and doorways in interior spaces, particularly entryways and hallways in elegant older homes and buildings. In these works, chiaroscuro techniques are employed to create dreamlike images that shift reflections of light and our perception of time and place. This will be Patti Oleon’s first exhibition with the gallery.

Oleon’s process, rooted in photography, produces works that question our concept of reality. While each painting is created from an image of an actual location, the artist relies on the cinematic effect of the camera to create scenes that reveal the light cast through doorways, curtains, and glass, often reflected in geometric patterns rendered in subdued shades of golden yellow, pale green and light blue set against dark shadowed walls. The camera’s function in capturing light abstracts and darkens most of the signifiers in each room. The particular location of each piece recedes in significance, and the works begin to function as if the artist is building a memory or forming a dream. Each room that Oleon depicts is a place that she has been, but the works also act as a space that she could be going. The mind is left to fill in the blanks—the color of the walls, the sound of footsteps on the hard floors, the feel of cool air from a drafty window…

The images in this series were originally shot on Kodachrome film. Oleon’s choice of film, with its mass popularity in the 1960s and 70s capturing every holiday, wedding, graduation, and family event, provides both an exquisite image from which to paint, but also an indicator of her works as a repository of memories, where past and present merge in a dreamscape of half-remembered visions captured by a now discontinued medium. Patti Oleon's paintings exude a palpable nostalgia for bygone days, yet with her evocative use of light she reveals an ephemeral quality, contemplating the transient nature of perception and the elusive essence of truth.

Patti Oleon (b. 1954, St. Louis, MO) lives and works in San Francisco, CA. Oleon received both a BA in Fine Arts and an MFA in Painting from the University of California, Los Angeles. Patti Oleon’s paintings are an amalgamation of contradictions, blurring the line between the real and the artificial, the dark and the light, and the banal and the transcendent. She uses traditional Old Master oil painting techniques to create works that reference the past yet are firmly rooted in the present. Her works have been exhibited at galleries and institutions including Cris Worley Fine Arts, Dallas, TX; Modernism, Inc. Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Mark Moore Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Angles Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. Edward Cella Art & Architecture, Los Angeles, CA; Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, CA; George Lawson Gallery, San Francisco and Los Angeles, CA; the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, San Jose; CA and the de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA. Oleon has received many awards and grants including the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Grant, the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant (twice), the Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant, and a Fulbright Fellowship for research in Munich, Germany.

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Patti Oleon, Tomorrow Looks Like Yesterday

Images by Charles White at JWPictures.com, courtesy of the artist and Lowell Ryan Projects.