Patricia Treib. Interstices

About

Treib’s canvases skirt the lyrical. She masses colors, one beside the next, so precisely that the subtle spaces or overlaps between them begin to feel physical, like a body’s close proximity or one falling away in absence. Treib draws attention to the spaces between shapes, making them into apertures through which nearness and distance oscillate. Treib has honed her language of composition to a point where it has attained an independent presence. She builds and modulates each motif through a series of rehearsals. Repeating and insisting on particular compositions, her focus becomes one of duration, giving new density to an experience of time. Sifting through a fixed number of elements, she works out relationships of proportion, contour, color and sensation on a small scale, painting on paper, adjusting and experimenting. However, she executes her final paintings with deliberate swiftness in order to achieve a light and sensuous surface. The color palettes for Treib’s paintings are often inspired by specific color memories. Her familiar, compositional references in many cases are supplanted by these remembered colors, which inform many of the titles for Interstices, such as La Roda and Asturian whose hues are directly influenced by the artist’s memory of a small Spanish village. Treib’s painterly marks suggest an unexpected spontaneity, while her recurring motifs disclose a consuming intentionality. It is as though her translucent and calligraphic gestures tremble on the canvas, pointing back to their moment of genesis while the compositions -- alone and in sequence -- chronicle a long journey from a distant origin.