With the most extraordinary technical ability, acclaimed hyperrealist painter Jeanette Pasin Sloan takes the familiar and makes it appear wondrously new. Over a distinguished painting career of more than 35 years, she has created a dazzling, new form of domestic still life painting in which canny depictions of reflected light and pattern playfully seduce the eye. Combining hyperrealistic portrayal with imaginitive composition, Sloan's art blurs the boundaries of reality and illusion, taking still life painting to the thin edge of abstraction.
Sloan's work is unique in honoring the formalist aesthetics of modernism while also elevating realism. Reminiscent of the complex patterning of Op art, her images of highly polished household items surrounded by and reflecting the geometric patterns of decorator fabrics are distinctly modernist - formalist - in composition, with thoughtful attention to the abstract qualities of line, shape and color. At the same time, her masterful rendering of reflected patterns and light on the curving, metallic surfaces of silver or tin cups, bowls, candlesticks and ordinary cookware creates some of the most interesting and beautiful realist painting imaginable.
LewAllen Contemporary is pleased to announce its representation of Sloan's technically and visually stunning work with a solo exhibition of recent paintings and prints in the LewAllen Galleries' downtown space at 129 West Palace Avenue in Santa Fe, November 7 through December 14, 2008. The exhibition it titled Illusion for the delicate balancing in Sloan's oeuvre between hyperrealism and abstraction and for what that represents visually and metaphorically.
Sloan works in oil on linen, and gouache and watercolor on paper, and also creates with lithography. She has referred to her subject matter as "heroic materialism." Her images treat everyday objects heroically while presenting them in ways that interact with the perception of the viewer to comprise a new take on what is real. The distortions of perception, she says, were unconscious in the beginning; she is more conscious of them now. "But," she adds, "I've always thought that my best work was right on the edge of disorder. I think it's as much about disorder as it is about harmony and balance."
Sloan resists the type of social or religious symbolism that has traditionally characterized the still life genre and, in particular, avoids the sentimentality of fruit and flowers. ("I never turned to nature," she says, because it "didn't have the formal qualities that interested me.") Yet, with reflective imagery, she creates a metaphor for how we are reflected in the things of our lives. The compositions are a kind of self-portraiture: she began choosing household items as subjects several decades ago when as a young, stay-at-home mother she painted the articles of domesticity that surrounded her. Years later, her unique and meticulously crafted work continues to suggest that even in the most ordinary lives there may exist the possibility to re-imagine the extraodrinary.
Sloan's distinctive artwork is in major collections including the Albright-Knox, Art Institute of Chicago, Cleveland Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Metropolitan Museum, National Gallery of Art, Milwaukee Art Museum, Nelson-Atkins, and the art museums of Yale and Harvard, as well as many others. She has had solo exhibitions in numerous leading galleries around the nation, and she is the subject of many books and articles.
Born in 1946 in Chicago and raised there - but also with long stays in Italy where her parents purchased a home - Sloan holds a BFA from Marymount College in New York and an MFA from the University of Chicago. She lives in New Mexico.
