Chamberlain solo show brightens Artspace gallery

Artspace
50 Orange St, New Haven, (203) 772-2709
Patrick Chamberlain: On Your MarkThrough June 26, 2010

Like his wife, sculptor Jessica Stockholder, painter Patrick Chamberlain is clearly enamored with color. On Your Mark is his first solo show of paintings—Chamberlain is a psychologist by profession—and it brightens Artspace's Gallery 1 with bold shapes and evident pleasure in applying paint to canvas.

Some of Chamberlain's compositions are rather minimalist, with oval shapes (I kept thinking of martini olives) juxtaposed with harder-edged forms. Of these, I thought "For Leo" worked best. In this painting, Chamberlain feathers the edges of his forms with slashes of paint, creating an energy that allows the disparate shapes to cohere as a whole.

Where he is less successful is in works where the various elements seem to sit side by side without fully relating to one another. This is the case to some extent with "Isolate Flecks," the dozen-paneled work that takes up the better part of the longest wall. The composition is h together by a recurring background motif of wide yellow and gold vertical stripes. Flowing through the work over the various panels is a sequence of abstract -- for the most part -- forms. Within this sequence, Chamberlain appears to be trying out different ideas, some of which are interesting and others less so. In one spot he paints Roy Lichtenstein-esque halftone dots, in another spot appears a stencil of a fern frond. These elements do appear isolated, as per the work's title, but not in a good way. It was hard to find a thread that tied them together into a compositional gestalt.


With "Fully Hokusai," on the other hand, Chamberlain's muscular mark making and jubilant color choices combine to generate a natural and nature-like vibrancy. Such is also the case with the untitled painting on the facing wall. Within this abstract painting, Chamberlain has created the illusion of depth, variations of light and the sense of vigorous motion.