Ruth Pastine: The Inevitability of Truth

Edward Cella Art + Architecture is pleased to present Inevitability of Truth, a new series of paintings by Ruth Pastine. The exhibition features the progression of Pastine’s ongoing investigation into furthering the limits of experience through fluctuating boundaries, relationships, and the structure of color.

Now defined by distinct frameworks of banding, Pastine’s new color field paintings transcend and offset the picture plane. Pastine creates paintings through a highly refined process of building layer upon layer of oil paint on canvas. Engaging both complementary hues and opposing values within a self-limited color system, her investigation of color—made with immeasurable small brushstrokes—produces impeccably subtle gradations of vibrant color and the experience of emergent light and spatial juxtapositions by transforming the materiality of the painted surface into a optically immaterial experience.

Inevitability of Truth, explores new territory for the artist in her search for a heightened edge, enhanced luminosity, and spatial tensions within the intersection of color. Pastine’s pursuit on the phenomenological investigation of color morphs into definable forms while still seeking to redefine and transcend our visual experience with an altogether new vigor.

This transition is an important move for Pastine as part of a deliberate conceptual leap 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 dialog between materiality and immateriality, presence and absence, matter and light, surface and depth, the finite and the limitless.”

ABOUT RUTH PASTINE

Ruth Pastine received her B.F.A. from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York, and her M.F.A. from Hunter College of the City University of New York. She has exhibited widely in the United States and Japan, and is included in many public and corporate collections, including Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; AXA Art, Cologne, Germany; Brookfield Properties, Ernst & Young Plaza, Los Angeles; Lakeshore Entertainment, Los Angeles; Qualcomm, San Diego, CA; and UNICEF, New York, NY. Last year, Pastine received her first museum survey show titled Attraction: 1993–2013 at Museum of Art & History Lancaster (MOAH) and earlier this year she presented Present Tense at the Carnegie Art Museum in Oxnard. The Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation recently acquired her work to add to its notable collections. This is her third exhibition with Edward Cella Art + Architecture. She currently lives and works in Ojai, California.