Joshua Petker

Subject matter aside, the compositions are astounding. The pieces create a visceral kaleidoscopic innervation. You almost don’t want to turn your back on some of them. They radiate. Some have a subtle exuberance that seeps toward the viewer from the deeply shadowed scenes of merriment, while others vibrate with a tropical fruit-flavored menace that demands a double take. There’s also an anxiety throughout that I find enjoyable. The stacked imagery and the composition create an optical distrust. “Yeah... distrust,” Petker says, “I like that word.”

 

While the new Avatar movie made me wish for a 3-hour case of colorblindness, hearing loss, and a general drop in IQ, Petker’s’ work makes me wish I could use CRISPR and graft mantis shrimp DNA into my ocular nerves. There are color combinations here that shouldn’t be in harmony, but he makes them look great. Like when you see a tall person dating a short person, and you think, yeah, I never thought of them together but it looks like a real good time. This is a body of work that begs to be seen and felt, in person. “That’s the fun for me,” he says. “I want something otherworldly… to show you more than you can see. Something about clashes. Sometimes Maria, my wife, will ask me, “Is this too much?” and I never know what to say because I like it too much!”

I pose synesthesia as a way to start discussing the choices he makes in regard to color, but he expresses doubt in having it, though “My daughter thinks she got it.” Then immediately the talk veers into music again.

 

“Music was a bigger influence than art,” he says. These paintings are harmonies, complex fugues of layers and colors, each supporting the whole even when they clash and create tension within the picture plane. There are riffs on motifs throughout these works. It’s like jazz, but not, landing somewhere closer to a live jazz performance where each player gets a turn to riff on the theme, but in this show the colors are the musicians. His color work is central to these new pieces, managing, for example, to render light as a semi-gaseous citron cloud in the largest piece, Cellar Song. It’s a large horizontal piece depicting various musicians, dancers, and revelers in a dark space crowded with all sorts of extraneous other characters. The palette ranges from a reddish blue duet with turquoise to a couple of fierce cadmium yellow streaks across a scarlet set of minstrel pants. Mustard yellows lie as anchoring bass notes syncopated across the diptych (even as I type this, I realize it doesn’t make any sense). In the piece Red Coats, the sky is turquoise, pale corpse green, and a watermelon rose all at once with a burning orange sun setting in the distance. But especially in this piece, you can see he understands the secret that made Gauguin’s so inexplicably strong—the grays. Half of the painting is subtly muddied and dun. There are fifty shades of alley cat carefully played out across this work, all of which make the colors shine even more without veering into the gaudy or glaring.

I wonder if there are any color combinations that are overly comfortable, mixes, or companions that he finds himself leaning toward in his studio. “I’m still in the blue and red, to be honest,” he says. “I just love that color combination. You have that blue on that red, and they move. Even when they’re not moving. There was a time I couldn’t use green, but now I can.” When I ask what changed, he shrugs, “Probably just learning to paint.”

 

We start talking about his studio practice. Every artist has a way they get themselves to create something novel, some combination of rituals, and even gambles, that provide a fertile atmosphere in which to succeed or fail. Amy Sillman describes a painting studio as a kind of “haphazard chemistry lab where non-scientists work like medieval alchemists.” Petker prefers to work alone. “I enjoy nearly every part of the job and feel I'm too flighty to manage having others help in the studio… I'm in the studio four to five days a week working normal business hours. I most often listen to audiobooks or podcasts. I love music but find it too distracting when I'm working. At least, no music with lyrics.” Which makes sense, since he’s composing rhythms and melodies, not writing poetry.

 

To paint these days is to make a conceptual choice. I should say, to paint well these days is to make a conceptual choice. Petker’s works affirm the vitality of choice of pushing around pigment on a surface. The sense of play and color within these pieces is that of a well-rehearsed group of incredible musicians … jamming. It has that feeling of a session. There is freedom throughout the pieces that allow “mistakes'' to look at home without forcing the eye to correct them. The artist’s hand is evident at the party, but not the voice taking over the party in a podcast-like monologue nor a giant BURP. So much work on canvas recently has been weighing down the ends of the spectrum of technique, overly fetishized technicians versus the regurgitated rebirths of zombie formalism.

 

Petker goes on to observe that he wants “to make paintings people like… attractiveness is a big part of it. This, I believe, is the core reason why the ‘paint is dead’ or ‘painting as sign making’ revolution lost the war. Paintings are great to look at. Collectors are going to look at it one way, academics are going to look at it another way… and for me, the goal has always been to make something that pleases both camps. That’s what I’m hoping for. Because they’re attractive, but I think you can dive into them on a more intellectual level.”