Surrealists Louis Aragon and André Breton recount in their novels the subtle reality-bending that occurs when friends walk the streets of 1920s Paris. By excusing yourself from the daily noise of the world, inspiration is readily available from all veils of consciousness and in whatever matter manifests itself as you walk through life.
The paintings of Patrick Corrigan are dreamy, landscapes of the mind, snowy worlds of juxtaposition. Corrigan takes a smoke break with Breton and walks down Congress Street to see what might happen.
Corrigan’s current show at Fort Nest on India Street originates with the artist’s experience as part of a demolition crew in various Portland apartment buildings. Building from salvaged panels of wood, Corrigan works with grit and grain, abandoned nail holes and chipped layers of paint to spin landscapes that speak outside of reality. If you are on a walk, the house you pass by is a reality. The person you imagine to live in the house is perhaps an equally valid reality, and perhaps no less one of your own creation.
“Blue Witch” is this extra-reality, a freeze-frame in a daydream, like a panel of an illustrated comic strip. A pervasive ghost leads a sinewy, Gory-esque, old woman away from a threadbare world. Ominous kitchen knives and an upturned book are left behind as the only relics from whatever reality the witch is walking away. The single frame achieves an unsettling reorientation into the daydream world of conjecture.
“The Pinkwoods” depicts a desert ground summarily drawn by a found line in the center of the salvaged wood panel. UFO clouds loom over smokestack plateaus and curlicue streetlights. Peppered across the foreground is a bulbous forest of pink trees composed of subsequent ripples of color. Corrigan renders his objects and places them in the landscape much like Hieronymus Bosch, albeit with a more graphic, flat color sensibility.
The horizon line is cleverly ambiguous. Are we witnessing a breath-taking dreamscape or a diagrammatic cross-section of underground forces? “The Pinkwoods” is a gorgeous painting exhibiting a compositional cohesion that brings to mind a harmonious musical arrangement. Corrigan as painter seems open to other aspects of art, the various elements of the painting ready to burst into different synaesthetic frequencies.
Corrigan broadens his inspirational scope with this musical sensibility and augments it with a graphic awareness. Dadaism took the increasingly ubiquitous printed word and ripped open the canvas with explosive collage. Corrigan’s approach, however, brings to mind the smooth simplicity of the software age. In an untitled painting, a curvy number 4 and bursting number 8 each occupy a floating sphere. Ribbon-like art-deco furniture, billowing hot-air balloons, and lanterns share the groundless stage. Once you use Photoshop, can you then dream in layers and masks?
