Patrick Gomez 4 Sheriff
3373 E. Olympic Blvd.
Los Angeles, Ca 90023
Pg4s.wtf
September 17th, 2015.
PATRICK GOMEZ 4 SHERIFF Gallery is pleased to announce ROBERT BLUMENTHAL: X
New York based artist, collector, and art dealer Robert Blumenthal will present a new series of paintings inspired by a childhood viewing of Pablo Picasso’s enigmatic “Women in a Hat”. Blumenthal has created a series of works that confront via portraiture the important women in his life, a long list of ex-girlfriends, lovers, suitors, and his struggle to reconcile their psychological impacts and lingering memories.
Blumenthal began his portraiture series over a decade ago, utilizing what he calls the “safe” space of his grandmothers painting studio in the family’s summerhouse in North Carolina. Since beginning the project ten years ago and working in a quasi ritualistic matter, Blumenthal has found himself adrift in a sea of portraits, constantly refining and editing out the various pieces, an ironic yet understandable nod to the way people rotate in and out of our lives with the unpredictability of a Vegas slot machine. Highlighting the glimmers and implosions of the artist’s vulnerability, anxiety, and mourning; Blumenthal employs a calculatedly muddled clarity to immortalize and question the role that these relationships have played in his life.
The untitled paintings present a simultaneously guarded yet open view of this complicated dynamic, pushing the boundaries of the artists honesty with his own personal moments, ranging from the banal to the ecstatic. In one instance we see a young women enjoying a marshmallow on a stick, her jagged face culled by the geometry of sharp lines and light refracted in melancholy pastel hues of melon, jade, turquoise and copper. Another women stares out at the viewer with hunched shoulders, her awkward body language and flattened expression struggling to wriggle its way out from beneath a choppy veneer of smeared oil paint.
Jutted up amongst the varied portraits, hangs painted images of a violent storm cell captured by Doppler radar, its long feverish tendons preparing to make landfall on the hapless people below. It’s a ubiquitous image in the age of mega storms and climate change, transfixing us with reality, a crushing reminder of nature’s wrath and the human connection, to forces much larger than the ones that lead to a falling-out over a text message sent in the heat of passion. For Blumenthal, who grew up in south Florida where hurricanes are practically a way of life, the storm holds a personal connection. All the while it arrives with the force of being ripped directly from his self conscious, an unresolved platform of soul searching that embodies the turbulent Zen of Blumenthal’s introspective forays into art making.
These forces come together to form a body of work that translates the insecurity and regret we are often beholden to, into a strangely endearing assemblage of declarations addressing the unrelenting confusion and fury of human relationships.
-Dennis Wornick
Robert Blumenthal is known primarily as an art collector and an art dealer – “X” will be the first exhibition of his own artwork.
