"Patrick Pryor"

One might spend hours trying to discern how Patrick Pryor's "Atlas" paintings might resemble maps or Titan with little success. The mysterious title's purpose may be to make the viewer linger and the paintings do deserve lingering. There is much detail that gets lost if due attention is not paid to these paintings, in which there is a competition, or perhaps a reconciliation, between the extremes of fortuity and intentionality. The figures, composed of intersecting arcs, are sketched out, but colored with deliberation, leaving little question as to where the object ends and the background begins.

Comparing the two paintings, one might see an aesthetic narrative emerge. Texture is given primarily by drizzling paint in one painting, and by the opposite method of making grooves, perhaps with the dragged other end of a paintbrush. There seems to be a before-and-after progression, an object shown intact and then shattered. It is a dramatization of the instability present in each painting, which abounds with graceful movement.

-Eugene Hwang