PAT ANDREA

Individuality set apart, in the history of avant gardes, Pat Andrea is not preoccupied by questions of disruption, historicity and progress, leaving that to the art writers and commentators, what he aspires to, is to paint. Since the 1960s, Pat Andrea has continued to explore the possibilities of genuine and personal painting. It is in fact in his intimate life that the artist seeks his inspiration: his “war of the sexes”, his loves and his tears.  But through a subjective realism that filters, deforms and distanciates itself and often plays with humor, the derision card. A realism that surpasses the anecdote or the naive illustration to reveal poetry and beauty in triviality. Combining small and great history, autobiographical memoirs and resurgence of myths or political events, Pat Andrea opens the intimate to the archetypal. 
His images touch the viewer and are remembered as they deal with a history that is common to all. Between desire, fear and violence, they open to our eyes like a small theater of human behaviors, in their most seducing, intriguing and ridiculous ways.  Pat Andrea puts this trivial reality in a singular way, in a hybrid painting that plays with contradictions and absorbs different forms of realism. Just as the artist's life was built on travel, from Holland to Paris or Buenos Aires, his work freely navigates from territory to territory, from the old masters to modernity, from Dutch painting to international art. His images are imprinted with coexisting plural cultures: the craft of the masters of the Quattrocento and their classical sense of space, the calm and silent composition of small Dutch interiors, but also the imbalance, noise, movement and excess of the Baroque period, the decorative geometry of Mondrian or the vivid and acid colors of Pop Art. From this hybridization, a double work is born which is both realistic and unreal, navigating between the impulsive and the reflective.  In these stories with multiple and undetermined meanings, we also find the artist's favorite themes, which have been present since the beginning, declined and reinvented with his abundant imagination. The places depicted by Pat Andrea, interiors there, landscapes here, endlessly repeat themselves: lunch on the grass, ballads in forest or in sea, the confined space of the bedroom or the living room. These are the quiet spaces of daily life, that the artist metamorphoses and transforms into an ambivalent threshold, at the limit of reality and fantasy, of calm order and cruel tragedy. In these settings, the figures evolve in the manner of archetypes: the woman, the man, the child, the dog. They invite us to look, through the various expressions of a couple and its troubles, the beauty and the drama of human behaviors: Howling Virgins, Pin-ups with children, cannibal smiles, astonishing Medusa hairdos, meditated pissers, breasts with knives drawn, "trouples" somersaulting, triggered asses, explosive nudes, butchered bodies on the grass, anthropophagous "Last Suppers", embraces and battles, flights and crashes. In Pat Andrea's brothel, Eros as always goes to war, armed with derision, cruelty, and tenderness. And the images that parade before our eyes are fictions reflected inside a room, where life endlessly begins all over again, from birth to the great disaster, in a perpetual cycle. But through a subjective realism that filters, deforms and distanciates itself and often plays with humor, the derision card.
A realism that surpasses the anecdote or the naive illustration to reveal poetry and beauty in triviality. Combining small and great history, autobiographical memoirs and resurgence of myths or political events, Pat Andrea opens the intimate to the archetypal.