Jon Pestoni’s paintings reward the careful viewer. His works not only consider the nuances of light, spatial tension, and materiality but they also display an abrupt, visceral engagement with color and gesture. They are aware, direct, forceful, yet understanding them demands perceptive, repeate... Read more
Jon Pestoni’s paintings reward the careful viewer. His works not only consider the nuances of light, spatial tension, and materiality but they also display an abrupt, visceral engagement with color and gesture. They are aware, direct, forceful, yet understanding them demands perceptive, repeated views. A painting which might appear to be a drab, post-minimal accumulation of quick marks, is also a primal, vibrational study, imbued with thought and economy.
Restrained and focused, Pestoni’s new works move away from suggestions of figuration and small, lyrical, surface marks toward an amplified palette, larger scale and bolder, aggressive forms. His characteristically abrasive, dry-brushed smears still slump down the surface, while his wide, obliterative, horizontally dragged marks conceal and recede, with meandering angles and saturated colors. The contrast between dry, light stroke and blunt, opaque band creates an alluring tension – doubly so, as this opposition also induces a sense that light is emanating from within the canvas. The physical interplay of surfaces, either glistening or light-absorbing, heightens the artist’s manipulation of light.
