Blackston is pleased to present Fragments and Refractions, Patrick Keesey’s solo exhibition of new drawings and paintings.

Building on Keesey’s interest in the relationship between seeing and marking, his ink drawings and oil paintings are a record of eye movement across a plane. The resulting non-representational shapes and mark accumulations explore the potentials of form and space in their own right.

Keesey makes marks in response to conditions of the immediate moment, and without a predetermined idea of the resulting image. His mandate to respond exclusively to the immediate moment can result in drawings and paintings that display only traces of the original history of the work. His intuitive and spontaneous mark making constantly challenges the already established history of each painting or drawing, and creates a delicate tautness between the most recent marks of each work, and those that preceded them.

The extent to which Keesey layers ink or paint, reworks a surface, effaces preceding marks, chooses color or leaves empty surface is the result of a precarious negotiation between a build-up of markings and consideration of space. His decisions vary in response to the conditions and experience of process.

Paint, in its materiality and manner of application, reveals an additional element of unpredictable stasis in Keesey’s practice. Certain paintings are complete with a concentration of marks, while in other works brushstrokes become virtually indistinct and surfaces are pushed to the outer limit of layering—the build-up of paint sublimating pre-existing evidence of marking. The paintings become, in their various states, self-generating explorations of surface.

The works in this exhibition explore what completion means in any body of work and what process reveals about making art.

Keesey is originally from Los Angeles and currently resides in New York City and Marfa, Texas. He graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in Painting. The artist has participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions, including Traces and Accumulations, Deffebach Gallery, Hudson, NY, 2010, and Recent Drawings at Bespoke Gallery in 2009. His paintings and drawings are included in a number of important private collections.