Exhibitions

Is the first solo exhibition in Europe by New York based artist, Patrick Groth. As the title suggests, the show comprises paintings of the eponymous two groups, casually charting the overlaps between them and tracing the persistence of their performative roles in society and art history. Rodeo clowns dress to be distinctive to both their audience and the bulls they are tasked with distracting. They hang patterned scarves from the waistbands of their oversized, cut-off jeans held up by extravagant suspenders. Their faces are painted in caricature with red noses and searchlight eyes. How they look reflects their use as comic interstitial performers between marquee events, but belies the rodeo clown’s relatively serious responsibility: to protect bull riders after they’ve been bucked by giving the bull an alternate target to charge at. Groth renders these tutelary goofballs with flat swaths of whole color, occasionally using reverse printed intaglio ink to draw in detail. Raw canvas is often left to stand in for white. Negative space plays a major part. The contours of a ten gallon hat or a sandwich board are suggested by the swaths of color surrounding them. This poppy flatness mimics the color separation of a serigraphed poster. At the same time, there is a painterly impulse that reaches deeper back into history. Courbet reportedly said that the figures in Manet’s paintings had, “the flatness of the king or queen on a playing card.” The paintings of soccer players are all small format, oil on canvas, painted with a scrubby, impasto, nearly-uniform mark. The players seem suspended in horizonless fields, whether turf green or the horizontal bands of the pitch-side advertising boards. Their uniforms are likewise on the brink of liquifying into pools of abstraction. In all but one painting the players interact with the referee, who is issuing red or yellow cards for offending behavior. Referees – not so dissimilar to rodeo clowns – are expected to marshall a fair and safe game for the participants. They aren’t risking life and limb to do it, but their standing amongst the audience as a maligned but begrudgingly accepted accessory to the main event is its own form of punishment. To have such a meaningful job and still exist at the margins of something captivating and grandiose is a bit of an existential short shrift. In the same vein, the largest painting in the exhibition is named for and draws from the painting Pierrot by Jean-Antoine Watteau. Pierrot, the tragi-comic sad sack turned counter-cultural hero, was first envisioned as a player in early commedia dell'arte and later reimagined by Cézanne, Picasso, Arnold Schoenberg, Jean Luc Goddard and David Bowie. Over the centuries, Pierrot has evolved into a kind of fellow traveler; a weary, taciturn entertainer whose experience of the melodrama of everyday life is transmuted into art. The referee and the rodeo clown might just be his descendants.