‘We become composites of data more than organic human beings... The new world order is here. If life is lived online, even sex becomes a proxy for the thing it once was, an imitation of reality to be recorded and uploaded. It becomes an advert for something that never happened. My paintings are the opposite. They’re visceral, performative, concrete.’ - Richard Patterson.
To Timothy Taylor Gallery to see another exhibition of abstract painting, this time the work of Richard Patterson who garnered fame as one of the wave of Young British Artist in the 1990s. This exhibition consists of thirteen small scale gestural paintings executed in Patterson's bravura brushwork. The title of the exhibition is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the online porn website OnlyFans on which sex workers produce pornographic content. As a response to the exhibition title some of the paintings feature the outlines of blurred female forms, barely discernible, lost in the tumult of thickly applied abstracted impasto strokes of paint. Some raise comparisons with the abstract paintings of females by Willem de Kooning, the fleshy excesses painted by Jenny Saville and the erotic abstractions of Cecily Brown. The warm flesh tones and colours are suggestive of the carnal delights served up by the content creators of the site. The ejaculatory streaks of white paint across the surface of the paintings are equally suggestive of the carnal gratification derived by viewers and subscribers to the site. Although these bodies are rendered sensuously in paint there is an obvious disconnect, a sense of distance and alienation because of the digital origins of the images. This contrast is encapsulated in one painting entitled Robot, whose title reinforces the remove and soulless process of the women going through the motions solely to please the viewers subscribing to their services. There is a strong sense of movement and life in these paintings though, they stand out like vibrantly coloured jewels against the stark white of the gallery walls.
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