Richard Patterson

Richard Patterson is British; a Londoner, to be precise. Having somewhat surprisingly found himself an expatriate, his very British-ness has become both point of pride and regular source of chagrin.

Like his countrymen, Patterson cultivates embarrassment as a kind of art. He has a veritable black belt in knowingly tasteless humor. He self-mockingly portrays himself at times as Mod-era-rock-hero-meets-hapless-David-Brent from “The Office,” but his clowning reveals the sort of wit that sometimes makes more difficult truths digestible. He’s a bona fide member of the YBAs, and was included in the infamous Sensation show (the effects of which still reverberate through art schools worldwide.) Now living in Dallas, he fantasizes of the ideal pickup truck while driving a Jaguar, demonstrating a certain conflicted attachment to his old homeland while showing an appreciation for symbols of the new. He’s just returned from England and his first solo show there in eight years. How exactly did he end up down the rabbit hole to this strange, somewhat vacuous, un-ironic land?

Patterson is a sort of nostalgic refugee from a scene that may not be witnessed again for a very long time. London in the mid-90s was probably the coolest place in the world: music, art, fashion, politics—they had it all, and made it all look so good. (It wasn’t all wine and roses—it was more like lager pints and cheap sex. But the world did get Oasis, Tony Blair, and Damien Hirst out of the deal…um..) But Patterson kept himself at a slight remove from the fray. After grad school at Goldsmith’s he spent a number of years hermitically holed up in his apartment attempting to master the Baroque recorder (yes, like that plastic thing from third grade, only crafted of wood and extremely difficult to play). It eventually dawned on him that he not only wasn’t destined for the concert stage, but that he needed to paint. Really paint. The obsessive strain in his makeup shifted from obscure 17th century musical instrumentation to obscure 17th century painting techniques, which he used to paint fin de siecle photo-based meditations on art, sexual identity, society, and motorcycles. “Jovially obsessive” describes Patterson’s approach to many interests, and that’s another one — Triumph motorcycles, the older the better (though he’s fairly well informed, even obsessed about, other bikes and cars). He’s one of those guys who can tell you how the front forks changed from the ’60 to the ’61 Bonneville, but then go to fussing over his hair to avoid getting mistaken for being overly macho.

So, London: he was a year or two ahead of Damien Hirst at Goldsmith’s. He participated in the legendary Hirst-curated Freeze, the show that launched a thousand careers (at least 50, anyway) and gave birth to a scene that would rival Paris in the 20s or New York in the 50s. While some of his peers engaged in now-infamous feats of binge drinking (etc.), Patterson mostly spent his time obsessively working in his studio. There aren’t as many famous pictures of him sloshed in pubs as some of his compatriots, but he did alright. Charles Saatchi bought his work like crazy. He showed with Antony d’Offay, that grand arbiter of taste and dealer par excellence. He continues to be avidly collected, and for what it’s worth has never had a show not sell out — though he’d not be the one to say so.

As the London scene began to dissipate, Patterson nurtured a fantasy about being an artist in New York — New York! — where he’d have five assistants in matching jumpsuits with racing stripes down the sides, and be wildly productive and successful. After debating the pros and cons, off he finally went. And was pretty much miserable. It was supposed to be the great melting pot, but he didn’t melt. The work came along, and he picked up a talented assistant who actually followed him later to Dallas (and who still doesn’t wear a jumpsuit.) But he didn’t even get to live in New York; you had to live in Williamsburg (even if your neighbor and pal was Fred Tomaselli), wandering shoulder-to-shoulder with the best generic black-clad hipsters America had to offer. In the end he found it depressing. He had a dawning realization that there were other American dreams he harbored. An opportunity to explore one arose.

He had come to Texas in 2000 for his Concentration show at the Dallas Museum of Art, and had a now-legendary encounter at the defunct Expo Lounge with his future wife, gallerist and former Observer critic Christina Rees. They fell in love, and lived first in London and then New York together. When the New York dream soured, Christina’s connections and family in Dallas beckoned. They moved here in 2003, and bought a modest house near Whiterock lake.

Finding a studio in Fair Park, Patterson began to delve deeper into the roots of his fantasies about America and the realities he’d subsequently encountered, from New York City to Dallas. Neither are what most would call the “real” America, but perhaps more than other places they throw into sharper relief certain paradoxes and discrepancies in the American condition and psyche. The new paintings reflect back to us images familiar but distorted, as in a fun-house mirror, by his own otherness. The alien fallen to Texas. Consumerism, voyeurism, racism, and trucks; air-conditioned, modernist glass houses acting less as refuge than as surveiled prison; lives built of pragmatic compromises, filling scary days with mundane activities. Not just cautionary tales told from a didactic outside, but personal reflections from right in it, copping to some of the foibles realized to be problematic.

The last year or so of work recently shipped off for their October unveiling at Timothy Taylor Gallery. A posse of friends and well-wishers also journeyed to see our transplanted Texan show us proud. He even flatly called the show Paintings from Dallas. The words themselves looked peculiar in the Bond St gallery window, literally foreign — and oddly pleasing. Patterson paintings from…Dallas? While the deadpan exotic title makes for good press, it also reflects his sincere investment in seeing his adopted city become a place with something significant going on. The challenge this poses is formidable, but not impossible. There are faint rumblings of seismic activity in the perpetually fledgling Dallas art scene, not least of which is his presence.

We recently met up at the All Good Café in Deep Ellum. He’s happy to be back. The show’s a sellout hit. His wife’s fears that he would want to move immediately back are alleviated for now. “London’s over,” he joked. “Not really, but it has sort of shifted to this New York model. People from all over the world are moving there in some self-conscious effort to be cool.” I asked what he thought about the Frieze art fair, which in its third year is setting records and shifting the global art landscape. “I don’t know. I don’t really care for art fairs. There’s this whole new phenomenon of artists making work just for the fairs…” He pauses to compliment the waitress’ new haircut. “Make sure that gets in,” he deadpans.

II asked him to talk about the imagery in the new work. “I’ve always dealt with subjects bordering on the cliché, really. I’m not alone in this — Pop is sort of the idiom everyone is working in now, whether they realize it or not. Abstraction included. So, there are really two ways to approach making art — one is to feel that you can’t do anything that’s been done before, in which case you’ll never make anything. And the other is that you embrace the cliché and try to surpass it. The risk is that you hover too close and never get free of it. My hope is to make the images grand enough they transcend it.”

We could use a little transcendence out here in Bush country. Patterson’s paintings provide it in unexpected ways. Rather than try to deal in spirituality, politics, or theory directly, in true Zen fashion he dives into mundanely personal and eccentric imagery, woven complexly together in the fifth of his Culture Stations, while in other work elements stand alone for singular, archetypal impact.

With his (more than simply personal) redemption of mid-20th century abstraction now old hat, he’s concentrating on a denser conceptual layering and freer play of images, reaching further afield and deeper within. The meanings of possibly clichéd sources and initial Photoshop maquettes are heightened and transformed by the giant shifts in scale and in the sheer rigor with which the paintings are executed. The largest take months (the smaller ‘just’ weeks) of painstaking effort so mind-boggling it simply becomes invisible — as it’s supposed to. Patterson makes oil paint do things it rightfully shouldn’t do. And so most people’s initial reaction in this digital age is “Wow. That sure is a big print.” The “a-ha!” moment of realizing it’s a painting, while not negligible, is of no real interest to him or to history; though somewhat paradoxically, it is from the intensity of process, craft, and magnitude that the images are imbued with transcendental possibilities. Patterson might question the metaphysical implications of such language, but would acquiesce that at a certain level it is precisely some sort of urge to escape a quagmire of meaninglessness and senselessness that fuels both his effort to concoct these images, and our own drive to seek them out. This is why his paintings matter; and they do matter.

He partly begins with materialistic fixations we all can relate to — what car to buy? What would my dream house look like? My ideal sex fantasy? — and like some aesthetic innoculation conflates and transforms them, providing a sort of antidote to a consumeristic vacuum using its own symptoms. And a good dose of humor. These paintings are often very funny, and oddly poignant. Idealistic themes in many guises run rampant through the work — materialist, personal, aesthetic, technical, and the grandly Modernist. But they’re always hamstrung, slowed-down to half speed, only half-believed—but never cynically killed off. The critiques are implicit, never high-handed. And so the banal makes this fitful leap beyond itself—less arch than Warhol (or Koons), and more human. There’s no wistful desire to become machine here. At the very least that would sap the heroic tedium of his process.

It’s curious how taut these paintings are, compositionally, technically, conceptually. Once a drummer, Patterson maintains a sort of rhythmic sense, a driving musicality that many of his artistic heroes were also clearly aware of. He even absurdly attached a cow bell to the first Culture Station and provided a drum seat, with the thought that one could keep time to the work, participate with and test it. There is nothing so literal now, but the paintings clearly have a buoyant beat or rhythm that, like a good song, doesn’t let you down. They swing, they churn, sometimes stately, sometimes raucous. There’s a payoff in time spent with this work, a virtuosity that is noticeably kicking. As in jazz and uiquitously now in pop music, quotations from predecessors and inspirations, plus the familiarity of certain images or themes, give toe-holds and entry points, lending depth and muscle. Patterson even mentions translating structural ideas directly from baroque music— the canon, the fugue. Buoyed by the solidity of the work’s structure you enter confidently and credulously into the oddness and grand theater of these illusionary spaces, populated with sexed-up or eerily menacing paint blobs, red trucks, diaphanous lesbian trios, toy cowboys, and a humble Patterson stand-in, immortalized in paint-stained studio shorts and Vans. It’s a generous everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach, courageous in its willingness to investigate the ridiculous, the perverse, the un-p.c., the touchingly personal — and enlivened by careful attention to each formal and conceptual consideration. And as such it’s a pretty good analog for time spent with the artist himself.

Richard Patterson is not soon to lose his Brit art street cred and persona. Hopefully he’ll pull a James Joyce and remain expatriated here awhile, musing nostalgically for an ideal London of the mind, from 5,000 miles and untold years away. In so doing, like the Irishman, he’ll keep teasing out the more mythic strands of his new and former homelands, continuing to develop an archetypal language that transcends the space between. Those lucky enough to know him personally are just hanging around waiting for him to get to the next joke (he tends to wear one out before moving on.) It’s sure to be embarrassing, which might just be the point. Laughter is deadly to sacred cows, and good medicine for a country at war in the world, and with itself.

Images courtesy the artist and Timothy Taylor Gallery.

Titus O’Brien is an artist and writer currently living in Dallas.