Atlanta-based painter Patrick Eugène’s first solo show with Mariane Ibrahim is a beautiful and affecting reflection on the past. A tribute to the incidents, immigrants, and ancestors that have brought the artist, and by extension we the viewers, to where we are today. With a loaded brush and decisive gestures, Eugène breathes life into a series of warmly hued portraits so potent that they seem to return the gaze. These people, as much real as imagined, call out with expressions of a life lived.
Eugène is self-taught and came to painting in his late 20s following an aborted career in finance. That’s a good thing. His works are guileless, free from affect and the conceptual contortions that prop up the art of the academic-industrial complex. That Eugène found his way from expressive abstraction to the clean contours of the Matissian Fanm ak flè (woman with flower) or Finding Home is a unique journey, and his figures still echo with the restless energy of earlier abstract approaches. Only now it is more concentrated.
Credit: Evan Jenkins
In addition to the paintings and installation, “50 lbs.” includes an intriguing, museological tableau featuring a small, peach-colored dress surrounded by snapshots and family photos. The fulcrum around which the show pivots, the display embodies a deeper preoccupation with the past that transcends identity and legacy; instead it points to a longing for a time before the rapidly shifting juxtapositions of social media and the mobile internet irrevocably altered our relationship with being and physicality, truth and reality.
“50 lbs.”
Through 5/20: Tue-Sat 11 AM-6 PM, Mariane Ibrahim, 437 W. Paulina, marianeibrahim.com
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