Patricia Treib »Armscye«

In addition to apertures, Treib’s paintings are composed around sensuous details, absences, and shifts in perspective. Despite their broad, sweeping gestures, the paintings can be seen as attentive meditations. Gleaned from sources that hold personal significance, Treib focuses on the space between forms, making in-betweenness a primary motif. Her paintings disclose these interspaces by transforming ephemeral non-things into iconic presences, whose highly pigmented color correspondences radiate an inner luminosity reminiscent of stained glass.

The temporal aspects of image making are central to Treib’s work. The paintings seek to be a record of observation through time—noting the irregularities and fluctuations that are part of bodily perception. As with the historical process of fresco, which required completion while the lime plaster was still damp, Treib limits the time of making—or performing—each painting to a single day. Partially concealed behind this decisive act are the innumerable rehearsals and revisions that lead up to the painting, both in the evolution of a motif over several years, developed through various works on paper, and in the removals, adjustments, and erasures that take place on the surface of the canvas itself.

While her work draws on far-ranging references—a detail from a 16th century Greek icon, an anniversary clock, shards from a ruined farmhouse in Southern Italy, a 1940s Vogue sewing pattern envelope—Treib’s true subject is the process of looking, through which she discovers new relationships while dismantling what is merely recognizable. We can follow the calligraphic route of each mark through Treib’s use of wide hake brushes and oil paints thinned to a fluid, ink-like consistency. Ripe, suspended forms nestle among accentuated flourishes, suggesting linguistic units or punctuation, and evoke medieval illuminations and 18th century Swedish Kurbits painting.