“You should wear white more often—it becomes you.
The next person to speak to you will have a very intriguing proposal to make.
A lot of people in this room wish they were you.”—Frank O’Hara
À la recherche du temps Pardue
In conjunction with our Main Stage production of Grey Gardens , PCS is proud to host an exhibition of breathtaking white-on-white paintings by Portland visual artist Eugenia Pardue .
Please join us here for an Artists Reception on First Thursday, June 4 from 5-7 pm in the Lobby of the Gerding Theater at the Armory (128 NW Eleventh). Featuring the music of Grammy-nominated singer Nancy King and jazz pianist Steve Christofferson , refreshments and no-host bar. Paintings will be on view until July 26. Exhibition made possible in part with the cooperation of the Heidi McBride Gallery .
A critically-acclaimed presence in the Portland visual artscape, Eugenia Pardue has had numerous solo, group shows and international exhibitions (including at Linfield College, Jordan Schnitzer Museum, at Art Basel, Switzerland, at Mark Woolley Gallery and at the Nines Hotel in the coveted Presidential Suite).
Pardue’s stunning white-on-white works are concerned with nature, sensuality and ornament. In her studio, deploying gallon upon gallon of acrylic paint, the artist uses tools to braid, mold, and weave paint into shapes that are sometimes soft and graceful, sometimes spiky and dynamic.
Reflecting an inclination toward both the opulent decorative roots of painting and the heroic impulse of contemporary abstract canvases, Pardue’s work references, “flowers, vines, trees, seed pods, and other vegetative motifs I find in the world around me, as well as in antique floral prints, wall paper, tiles, tapestries, and jewelry design.” The paintings are pure, meditative, and sacred, painterly and sculptural, minimalist and maximalist, serene and dramatic.
Whimsy and foreboding mix it up in the work of Pardue—inspiring a meditation on the color white in all its varieties:
White as elegance, cooling, hopeful balm or a blurring, burning intensity. Like the polarity between Grace Kelly’s wedding dress and the sweat-and sin-inducing velocity of Jimmie Lunceford’s big band playing White Heat (delivered at a blistering 364 beats-per-minute). White as hygiene, modesty, innocence, or for the Japanese–death and “deuil blanc” mourning. The color white can suggest an aching, minimalist ars poetica where white space is synonymous with silence and small gesture—think of John Cage’s 4′33”—the little white dress of the avant-garde. White-on-white painting can conjure a slow-motion riot between translucence and opacity offering infinite variations, permutations, and transfigurations of white that are far from blank or meaning-free.
Simultaneously baroque, austere and threatening in their beauty, Pardue’s paintings mirror the promise of the 1940s-era Bouvier Beales, prior to going native and becoming what Kim Morgan describes as “exotic birds of a paradise lost–two real-life Daisy Buchanan’s gone Baby Jane Hudson.”
The paintings’ organic and botanical sensuality suggests echoes of another 1940s era siren: the moral ambiguity of white-dressed Lana Turner in the Postman Always Rings Twice. Hollywood figured that “dressing Lana in white somehow made everything she did less sensuous.” Instead of purity or hope, Turnerian White took on a corrosiveness that was anything but neutral.
The works look lovely against the renovated 1891 walls of the Armory, but could easily fit into the collection of a Norma Desmond, Miss Havisham, Edie or any of those “rowdy girls that mesmerize us with their musty mansions, fierce honesty, and haunting presence.”
Like the wildly creative Little Edie, the paintings refuse to be held within the acceptable bounds of the frame —seeking instead to be alive in the world and in the minds of the viewer. The work straddles a fragile tipping-point between clarity and grace and danger and seduction and begs the ultimate white question: does illumination truly trump darkness?
Loading ...
