The Simultanism of Patrick (McElnea)

The following started as a review of a recent visit with the artist Patrick McElnea in his Los Angeles studio. Then he responded. So we keep it going...

Patrick McElnea, Shell, 2024, oil on wood panel, 27 x 28"

I’ve become a bit obsessed with Patrick Henry Bruce lately, mostly because of his painting in the Carnegie which I get to see every time I go.  It’s apparently one of a very few you can see since Bruce destroyed much/most of what he produced before taking his own life in 1936.  The painting is a deconstructionist’s playground with muted colors haggling cubist shapes to challenge an optical tug of war.  We are grounded by right angles, deceived by aimless shadows, and balanced against a desperate void. I think it’s important to know he painted this alongside Picasso and Braque and Gris, and he’s further credited for fashioning Orphism and Simultanism with Delaunay.  Color is essential.  But so is “the concurrent presentation of elements from different places, multiple points-of-view, radically disconnected segments of time, and separate media. Like Futurism and to some extent Cubism, Simultaneism took up elements from and responded to major developments in modernity: technological innovation, large-scale urbanization, mass telecommunication, and scientific discoveries.” A kinda reminder that progress can be good and necessary, but it’s still a sum of parts.

Patrick Henry Bruce, Untitled, c.1928, oil and graphite on canvas, 35-3/8 x 46"

This past month I met another Patrick — @mcelnea (thank you @ivagueorguieva!)— and after a visit to his studio I left thinking about the other Patrick again.  Patrick (McElnea) is an artist who explores “how pictures of the unidentifiable perceptually mutate into identification by the imaginations they inspire.”  He’s also wickedly intelligent, and he’s one of the first people I’ve met who is actually comfortable talking about Barnett Newman.  The guy knows a lot about where art has been.  And he’s obsessed with using that knowledge to carry us all to where it can goes next. 

One of the most incredible elements of Patrick’s painting is his process.  He creates storyboards (though I don’t think that’s what he calls them) that look like something straight out of an episode of Mad Men.  They deconstruct the perceptual warfare brand marketing wages on our associations with value and trust, and this crafts a blueprint for the fractal boundaries stitching colors and lines we still hold familiar to the impulses of influence.  Orphic in its movement of time through a harmony of hues, McElnea’s paintings are a similar sum of parts rearranged and reconsidered.  But it’s inspired by nature, by the real, elevating what would otherwise be a cubist meditation to a more generative spontaneity of light and form.  His paintings feel like what you see when you close your eyes real tight and think about the last thing you heard.  Now open them.  Funny how that can change so much of what you saw just moments before.

Patrick McElnea, Organic Valley, 2024, oil on wood panel, 24 x 18"

A particular favorite is Organic Valley.  Colors stipple shadows in a field with a view that may be near or far.  We are grounded by the weight of an obstruction we oddly want to reach out and grab to balance a lurking vastness.  It’s a painting that is either closing in on itself, or stretching out to discover its space.  Either way it is the energy of remembrance and the pliability of uncertainty.  Patrick (Henry Bruce) would be proud.    

The world can’t have enough Patricks :). Check out https://mcelnea.com/ or @mcelnea_studio to see if you see what I see, he’s a fantastic Los Angeles-based artist!

PM: In terms of "notes" I'd only say two things: I think of the story-boards as "project-boards", like the things we made for science-fair presentations as kids. They reveal how my free-associative imaginings get distilled down to a specific motivation for a painting (Iva [Gueorguieva] is slowly convincing me that these might also be art, so I'll probably post some on my site by the end of the month). And without obsessing too much about the word, in the context of technology and consumerism, I often use "progress" pejoratively -- at least in terms of this work. The relationship between corporate logo design and painting since industrialization involves using the ladder to better understand the ideological weight of the former. Plant shadows are a crucial wrench thrown into that long, intimate relationship bridged by folks like Herbert Bayer and Paul Rand. I basically see nature (ie. silhouettes of flora) as opportunities to shatter/reconfigure/pervert the onslaught of logo-litter we are forced to collectively consume. Cheetos, ADT, Organic Valley logos are filtered/reconsidered through Hollywood sidewalk shade. Not sure how much of this comes through to a viewer. But "Deconstruction" is great because it points to my attempts at dissecting late-capitalist ephemera wherein discarded trademarks make up the entire world of these scenes, and are also on the morgue autopsy table. I just say this to elaborate and no pressure to add it to your post. I DO believe in a kind of progress, which involves remaking our streets and psyches in ways that remodel the toxic offcuts from the previous two centuries. Not sure if any of that's clear because I've only begun writing about it all! 

Patrick McElnea, Boro, 2023-24, oil on wood panel, 18 x 24"

vohkl: I do want to say firstly that I agree with Iva, your project boards are art and I think they carry the viewer almost as strongly as the paintings they motivate.  More on that in a minute…

Patrick McElnea, United Necklines, 2023-24, oil on wood panel, 24 x 18"

Secondly, I love your references to Bayer and Rand.  Logo-litter, discarded trademarks, late-capitalist ephemera… inorganic waste you are repurposing in a blueprint of shadowy and abstracted veneer… I’m immediately reminded of Kurt Schwitters and Merz, his Merzbild a formula of color and shape to discover a sublimity in discarded things removed from their original attachment to realign a perception of value.  He identified a freedom in this, almost like a poetic license for the contaminated contemporary, and that’s what I see first in your project boards.  They become like a generational diaspora gathered in a shoebox, collaged to collectively rebuild the version we were never meant to see.  But because it’s just a draft, what I would assume is a suspended but not necessarily unalterable state, it represents a potential in all things.  Deconstruction is not destruction.  You have found a way to rise above.

And in that you are able to discover beauty, which seems to be what you are then reflecting in a reciprocating structure founded in paint.  It’s a form of what John Elderfeld in his excellent article “The Early Work of Kurt Schwitters” called “constructed abstraction”.  But I’d argue you’ve solved a fundamental challenge for Schwitters, which Edlerfeld describes:  “The problem Schwitters posed for himself was to relate added materials to the surface and edges of a picture in a way close enough to affirm its totality without yet forcing everything else but high relief forms into an illusionistic hollowed space. Or, to put it in another way, to reconcile what he called the “personality poison” of the materials to the demands of picture-making”.  Because you are working this poison out first in your assemblages, you allow the paintings a freedom of unencumbered expectations.  Still, I would argue they are better together, the reestablished value at its best when considered as a whole.  Again, from Schwitters: “… it is only important that all the parts are correlated to the whole. It is irrelevant whether materials had any established value before they were used for producing a piece of art. They receive their evaluation through the creative process.”  Its entirety is that process, the process of deconstruction-assemblage-renewal, that allows the viewer to take back and own what was once poisoned.  “The reality of what we see is what we can handle” states Schwitters.  Your paintings are the new reality of an assembled waste and your process then applies a cubist assemblage to a surface we are more readily, and willingly, able to handle.      

Patrick McElnea, untitled, 2024, watercolor marker on laser print, 11 x 17"

Elderfeld also notes: “Schwitters first called the collages “Merz-drawings,” thus separating them from the painting genre, and only later felt the need to explain that they should also be regarded as pictures”.  And he concludes “These works are art (the objects are included); but by the precariousness of their inclusions (referring beyond their unique art contexts to earlier stylistic conventions and stealing from life) they function also as systems expediting the perception of art, as perceptual fields within which the viewer is encouraged to perform."  Your project boards + paintings = systems of constructed abstraction?  Regardless, I think they are better together.

Patrick McElnea, Hole Persons, 2024, oil on wood panel, 27 x 41"

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