On view November 22, 2023 through September 1, 2024
I’m interested in the look of things and the quality of being there. A moment that is completely frozen with all the variety of textures; rust on poles, crumbling asphalt, light hitting the grass.
Rod Penner
In the late 1960s, a new genre of realist painting emerged in New York City and San Francisco. While Pop art and abstraction remained the dominant forms of painting at the time, a group of artists explored the convergence of photography and painting. Dubbed “Photorealism” by the gallerist Lou Meisel, a cohort of artists used their own photographs to create landscapes, portraits, and still lifes in exact detail. To create such precise paintings, the Photorealists often employed projectors to enlarge their images onto canvas and utilized novel tools, such as spray guns, to render works with smooth surfaces. Brushwork, particularly bold gestural mark making, was abandoned in favor of a look that mirrored the quality of the photograph. The pictorial content varied but typically the West Coast artists favored everyday scenes of daily life. East Coast artists captured the shiny allure of chrome objects, such as diners, trucks, cars, and the typography of signs and advertisements. Artists on both coasts emphasized light and reflection in their paintings, which remains a signature element of Photorealism.
Rod Penner’s photo-based work inherits the legacy of Photorealism but also challenges the aesthetic of the genre. For nearly 40-years, Penner has painted America’s small towns. While much of his work portrays communities in Texas and New Mexico, Penner’s paintings explore the beauty in absence and decay that inhabit the once bustling corridors of Main Street, America. In this selection of eight paintings, Penner details deteriorating building facades, aging signs, and vacant streets devoid of people. Brooding clouds and expansive skylines loom above the one and two-story buildings, further highlighting the spectral quality of the town. Penner’s use of light and shadow, as well as reflections in puddles, create both a sense of drama in the composition and emphasize the passage of time.
To create his paintings, Penner uses his own reference photographs and videos to render precision of subject, light, and form. Unlike the Photorealists, he is not interested in recreating the photographic image, rather he uses the photo as a sketch. He photographs sites in the evening or Sunday mornings, finding inspiration in the solitude and quietness of the moment. In the studio, Penner uses a small paintbrush to laboriously render the details and visual textures of each scene. Although from a distance the works may appear as a photograph, close inspection of Penner’s paintings reveal his carefully placed brush marks. Each painting represents the artist’s poetic interpretation of Americana and the enduring presence of the past.
