Ochi Projects and Emily Friedman Fine Art are pleased to present Ruth Pastine: Depths, a Pop-Up at Ochi Projects, featuring a curated selection of paintings, pastels on paper, and a new series of paintings on paper featuring the newest advancement of Pastine’s investigation of the perception of color through fluctuating parameters, relationships and structures. Depths reveals the essential tensions that drive Pastine’s work: surface and depth, light and matter, materiality and immateriality, the finite and the limitless.

Informed by the systematic understanding of color developed at the Bauhaus and the 19^th Century research of Michel Eugène Chevreul and his discovery of simultaneous contrast; her new works challenge phenomena of color perception and the relativity of color, light and space in an installation that reveal themselves between the uncertainty and intentionality of their making. For Pastine, “Color itself, in its infinite beauty, constitutes the terrifying immeasurable field of light and space that it defines.”

This exhibition affords viewers the opportunity to consider color field paintings that transcend the visual field. Pastine describes this by saying, “There is a reciprocity between predetermined systems of color and canvas format, and these known systems are in constant opposition to the spontaneity of the painting process itself.  As these systems change and advance; the opportunity for mediation between the known and the unknown embraces my philosophical interests in the sublime which Immanuel Kant defined as requiring the presence of something terrifying and beautiful.”

Exploring new color relationships, Pastine creates paintings through a highly refined process of building layer upon layer of oil paint on canvas and paper. Engaging both complementary hues and opposing values within a self-limited color system. Made with immeasurable small brushstrokes, her impeccably subtle gradations develop spatial juxtapositions by transforming the materiality of the painted surface into an optically immaterial experience.  For Pastine, “Color is a vehicle for existential experience, for engaging in the present moment of discovery. The finite complementary color systems paradoxically afford the essential parameters that access limitless possibility. When in orchestration with the spontaneous process of painting itself, there is the potential to transform the materiality of the painted surface into an optically sensual and spiritual experience.”

Depths presents a conceptual move to contextualize the interplay of transcendental fields with definable forms. By bringing together the tangible with the intangible, Pastine states that there is, “an essential tension in my work, an ever-present exchange and dialogue between presence and absence, matter and light, light and space, intention and spontaneity, and the finite and the limitless. This demands letting go, and accepting the free fall of the unknown, and risking failure. The unknown is always at the edge of discovery and is the on ramp to new work.”

Born in New York City, Pastine earned a B.F.A. from Cooper Union in 1987. Pastine was awarded a travel and independent research grant to attend the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam, Netherlands where she lived and worked from 1987 to 1988. She later attended Hunter College where she received an M.F.A. in 1993. In 2009, Ruth Pastine began site-specific work with a large-scale public commission entitled Limitless, composed of eight monumental paintings installed in the adjoining lobbies of Ernst & Young Plaza, in downtown Los Angeles. In 2014, Ruth Pastine had her first museum survey exhibition entitled: Attraction: 1993-2013 at MOAH Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, CA with exhibition catalog essays by Donald Kuspit and Peter Frank. In 2015, she opened Present Tense: Paintings and Pastel Works on Paper 2010-2015 at the CAM Carnegie Art Museum, Oxnard, CA. Ruth Pastine has exhibited widely in the United States and Japan and Pastine’s works are included in numerous public and corporate collections, including the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; SFMOMA San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; MCASD Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Los Angeles; MOAH Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, CA.

Pastine’s work is also on view in The Light of Space at MOAH Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, CA from February 8, 2020 to April 19, 2020