FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE*
Project Room:
Patssi Valdez, "Installation/Painting"
April 24- May 30, 1999
Reception: Friday, April 30, 1999, 6:00 - 8:00pm
PATRICIA CORREIA GALLERY
Attention: Amy Perez or Rafael Gallardo
Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bldg. E-2, Santa Monica, CA 90404
tel.310.264.1760 fax.310.264.1762
E-mail, correia@earthlink.net
Web page, http://www.correiagallery.com
Gallery hours: Tuesday-Friday 10am-6pm, and Saturday 11am-6pm, Sunday-Monday closed
Patricia Correia Gallery is pleased to announce work by LA based artist Patssi Valdez in her first exhibition with the gallery. Valdez will create an installation called the "Living Room". In Valdez's world, that means both a place for living in, and a place which is itself alive. She is planning a complete transformation of the gallery's Project Room, installing drapery, furniture and a mantle like stage set. New paintings will adorn the living room wall at appropriate intervals, like they would in someone's house.
The installation in many ways is the perfect explication of ideas which exist in Valdez's paintings themselves. Her iconography is derived mainly from domestic or at least domesticated environments (interiors, gardens, scenic views) that traditionally sought to clarify the ways in which people create the energy in their domestic environments and how their homes express their identities in both conscious and unconscious ways, just like art.
Patssi Valdez received her BFA at Otis /Parsons School of Design and has recently had a retrospective exhibition, "A Precarious Comfort", at the Mexican Museum in San Francisco as well as having a survey solo exhibition at the Laguna Art Museum this Spring from April 24th through July 11th. Valdez has also been honored with the Durfee Foundation grant.
-From Artweek March 1999, review by Juan Rodriguez "Patssi Valdez at the Mexican Museum":
"In 1980, Harry Gamboa photographed Patssi Valdez as a member of ASCO ("nausea" in Spanish), a performance group based in Los Angeles (that included Gamboa, Gronk and Willie Herron). This photograph captures an image of Valdez herself as the content of her own work. "A Precarious Comfort", Valdez's current exhibition of paintings at the Mexican Museum, is stranglely illuminated with this same continuity; - the artist's self-image- though with clever variations. Valdez's paintings from 1988 to the present transfer self -identity to everyday objects and domestic spaces, thus the exhibition contains self-portraits as well as portraits of Virgins, Goddesses, and an installation of a little girl's room.
Valdez's paintings of domestic interiors (los cuartos y la cocina) are rendered with distorting illusionism and a limited palette of saturated reds, yellows, greens and blues that aggressively draw the viewer in. The walls, tables, chairs, cups and saucers all bend, crack and tumble in these works, seemingly embodying Valdez's emotional state. These paintings are visual metaphors for potentially explosive violent scenes. After 1995, however, Valdez's art settles down into a gentler and suppler look. Valdez's intense colors and detailed, somewhat fantastical rendering of domestic comforts palpably convey her emotional state, as if these interiors were the self incarnate."
Return to Patssi Valdez Essays
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