Pentimenti Gallery
in Old City has double the visual intensity throughout the month of
November. On display right now is a two-person show by artists Francesca
Pastine and Jackie Tileston that plays with colorful, fluid forms in
both abstract painted manifestations and appropriated constructions made
from physical art publications themselves.
Francesca Pastine, “Unsolicited Collaboration with Kara Walker, Artforum Excavation Series.”
Works by Pastine are immediately intriguing in that they are all
(dis)assembled from used magazines. The artist utilizes X-acto knives to
slice and reshape the recognizable objects of print publication from
boxy pages to organic, dripping swaths of patterns. At a time when print
is quickly fading into the background in favor of web-based publishing,
these melting magazines make for an apt metaphor surrounding their own
obsolescence. Furthermore, these books are not just any discarded
Newsweek that Pastine found in her local dentist’s waiting room, they are her friend’s unwanted copies of
Artforum.
Morphing the very stuff of contemporary art and placing it squarely in a
gallery is not just a nudge at paper production, but at the art world
itself.
Francesca Pastine, “Artforum 45.”
Cut paper allows for the inclusion of actual depth into these
montages. The structures are more relief sculpture than collage, but
they tug at the coattails of two-dimensional art as well, seeing as they
are literally composed of flat images. Pastine plays with this element
quite a bit, digging warped, rectangular pits into the cover of Artforum
or layering the pages into bookmark-like blobs that peek out from
inside the books. Particularly stunning is Pastine’s “Artforum 45,”
which shows a group of white-clad bodies seemingly falling onto one of
her contoured pools of color. The key word here is onto, and not into.
The fact that the people rest atop the form instead of sink into it
references its existence as a solid object and not just an amorphous
puddle.
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