Patrick O’Rorke at Whitney Art Works
By IAN PAIGE | January 17, 2007
Q-BERT AS ART: O'Rorke's untitled tessellation. |
There was a time, in the middle of the last century, when the art industry and its critical minions held the padlock keys to artistic straitjackets, fitting artists’ oeuvres into one-size-too-small versions of pre-formulated art history . . . wasn’t there? Perhaps hindsight offers a more streamlined recollection of this formalist past without dialogue but, regardless, this last stretch into the 21st century has seen a veritable Aquarian blossoming of revisited methods and forms seen previously as artistic dead ends.Riding his bike around these forgotten cul-de-sacs is the young artist Patrick O’Rorke. By no means a self-proclaimed spokesperson for the “What the hell should we do now?” generation, the recent graduate of the Maine College of Art is nevertheless of his time and inspired by speed. There’s an old theory that the mode of perception that allowed for abstract painting developed in tandem with the newly experienced views available from a train-car window. The relentless pace of the modernist era has now moved into our heads. We can only keep up if we drink enough Red Bull and watch ever more extreme sports on ESPN.
“It’s Not Yours, You Stole It” is up now at Whitney Art Works on York Street and showcases an artist comfortably lost in the Times Square of the art world. O’Rorke’s current artistic endeavors find him near the neighborhood of the quilting tradition. Abandon the pathos of memory associated with the traditional craft and you have a contemporary digital mash-up of assemblage and abstract expressionism. It’s just so confusing to navigate all that information these days, so, like any good post-post Modern boy, O’Rorke takes a private collection of Frank Stella canvases and sews them together to his liking in order to patch his jeans like he doesn’t give a fuck. Except he does.
The most successful of these genetically modified hybrids are two full-size, plywood installations for the gallery wall. One untitled piece consists of a human-scale mountain of tessellating diamonds that rise from the gallery floor. The thickness of the plywood provides a physicality for an otherwise ephemeral homage to Op Art. The diamonds create a collection of cubes indecisively dancing between vantage points (although this is a traditional quilt pattern, anyone growing up in the ’80s will have trouble disassociating the piece with the playing field of the video game Q-bert). Muted chromatic choices lend the piece a seriousness that would be lost with a more vibrant optical assault.
The second piece is more meditative and subtly reverential. Color fields in unique trapezoidal configurations fill most of the gallery wall, terminating in tandem to give the impression of a framed work. The brightly colored shapes hover above the white void much like panels of stained glass. Strip this metaphor of its Christian context and you’re left with a spiritually impoverished Photoshop filter, a single button that, when pressed, blows out the pixels into abstract color relations. Both pieces demand the viewer’s watchful participation, featuring optical movement that questions background and foreground relations.
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