Reviews

Ripping It Up

SF WEEKLEY, By Hiya Swanhuyser, May 28, 2008

Francesca Pastine, Alterations: A 9B pencil is the softest pencil available: It's almost liquid. If it weren't made of lead it would make great eyeliner. An artist can choose to use a light touch with it, of course, but Francesca Pastine doesn't. At "Alterations," she shows three series, two of which involve the heavy application of graphite to newsprint, and one she made by slicing and curling Artforum magazines. She's interested in print publications, clearly. Back to the 9Bs: "Invisible Women" and "Iraqi Casualty" find Pastine layering their lead over pages of the New York Times in order to highlight certain images. The result reminds us of John Lennon's FBI file; the artist thinks it looks like "graphite leaf." Either way, her chosen photos stand out in a sea of darkest black while the paper's uncovered, datestamped edges remind the viewer of their official status. In the third series, "Artforum Excavations," exploded versions of the ultra-glossy last word in creative trends show an attitudinal, literal stab back at a publication that probably irritates a lot of artists.
May 29-June 14, 2008

DOMESTIC MINIMALISM

Kustom Kitchen Kulture

by Erick Fredericksen

FRANCESCA PASTINE is a San Francisco Artist whose work seems Southern California: L.A. cool, not S.F. funk; 20th century L.A., not 19th Century S.F. Her paintings, now showing in the cramped back hallway at James Harris Gallery, start with a smooth sheet of industrial stainless steel, its edges folded over into smooth, rounded edges. She paints directly onto the metal, without gesso, undercoat, or any other preparation. Really looking at the surface of this material is revelatory for anyone who, for reasons of inebriation or just mental tiredness, has found himself contemplating the top of a garbage can would testify. Gray, silver, or black in spots-- depending on lighting and variations in the surface-- the steel carries a cool glow with glimmering, jewel-like highlights. Respecting her materials, Pastine paints only lightly on this surface, leaving much of it exposed.

Pastine's painting hand is loose yet tidy, covering the sheet with repeated forms which range from thin, wavering lines to small, stenciled blots that resemble potato prints. There are links with mid-century art, from the minimalist grid loosely laid over one of Silent Treatment's (1999) two panels to the abstract, expressionist influenced composition of a 1998 untitled work--but I wouldn't make a simple equation out of this fact. Pastine's work draws as much from the vernacular culture of post-war America as from its art specifically, Kustom Kulture auto pinstriping, and kitchen and bathrooms.

The kitchens and the bathrooms are the easiest to tease out. Pastine's colors tend toward pale pink, avocado green, sky blue and bright yellow--all colors associated with '60s refrigerators, ovens, sinks and tiles. Her forms are similarly domestic: little heart shapes arranged in flower-petal-like groups of five in Silent Treatment and Flutter (1998), a budding tree branch form in Untitled (1996), and a curving, single line shape in the left panel of Untitled (1998) that resembles both a loose rubber band (seen as a line), and the sandpapery, flower-shaped stick-ons that keep you from slipping and bonking your head in the tub (seen as a solid).

The pinstriping reference is probably unintentional, but it's there in the sleek, thin line of her brush, in the curves of that line, in the shininess of her metal support. But it's a loose link: Pinstripers tend to take simple shapes of images and work them into baroque, vibrating, barely readable forms composed of many curving, crossing lines, while Pastine's complexity comes from overlapping simple shapes. it's two different sorts of blur. The common ground is found in a much larger tradition of decorative arts--call it "more is more." Pure description and plainness are enemies of this tradition, which loves detail and richness.

Pastines's diptychs tend to contrast feminine and masculine forms. The aforementioned Silent Treatment has the little heart shapes next to a steel sheet covered in a grid of spindly lines, like country home stencil-shapes matched up with graph paper. But Pastine's grid is not strict: formed of loose, slightly wavering lines, it brings to mind Agnes Martin's delicate, human--and feminine--minimalist drawings. Pastine's positioning is remarkable, poised at the intersection of two large art trends: feminized minimalism with no taste of of brutal machismo, and minimalism which refers to the world outside of the hermetic discourse of art.

Which should lead me out of the art and into that world, I suppose, but it doesn't. This is not disappointing to me, though. Pastine's real-world references are important to her art, but it's less fun to think about those connections than it is to simply revel in the beauty of the work.

Suspended Belief (1999) uses a thin lined form looking like a closed eyelid or part of a radiant sun: a dipping horizontal curve with rays extending from its bottom. Pastine's hand is evident in these shapes, in the way the rays or eyelashes trail off from thicker beginnings. A second panel is covered in pale blue: the color of sky when your eyes are open, not the blood-red you see through those closed eyelids. This painting also uses the mid-century domestic colors of her other work--yellow, pink, light blue--but feels more outdoorsy. Its references are less specific, which makes it more satisfying because you don't have to think about it as much. You can just let your open eyes glance over the icons representing closed eyes, or rest them on the cool blue of the painting's other half. Just beautiful.


f r a n c e s c a p a s t i n e ::press::
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resume MARIN INDEPENDENT JOURNAL JANUARY 7, 2009 Working artist: Pastine focuses on physicality of objects Christine Brenneman Francesca Pastine's ArtForum series of excavated magazines will be displayed at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito. To hear local artist Francesca Pastine tell it, her artistic life began practically at conception. Her mother and father were both working artists, and her childhood was spent immersed in a milieu of paintings, sculpture, art studios and constant talk of the creative process. Pastine, a multimedia artist and painter, now lives and works out of her home in San Francisco's Mission district. There, she creates paper-based sculpture and realistic paintings, often using ordinary materials in her artworks. This month, Pastine and 19 other California artists will be featured in a group exhibition, "Front + Center," at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito. Each participant applied for the center's prestigious artist-in-residence program for 2009; though these applicants did not get the residency, their work was chosen for the annual kickoff exhibition, which showcases up-and-coming artists in a variety of visual media. Four pieces from Pastine's ArtForum series of "excavated" magazines will be on display. Q: There's an overarching theme in your work of calling attention to the physical nature of your materials - whether you're painting shopping carts used by the homeless, cutting snowflakes out of the New York Times or chopping into an ArtForum magazine. Can you talk about why that's important to you? A: In those specific bodies of work, I wanted to work with things that were immediately at hand. I'm interested in the physicality and materiality of objects: Advertisement Marin Sonoma Mosquito & Vector Control District the object-ness of the shopping carts, for example, the piles of things, the ways in which they were covered and piled with blankets. That theme runs through, wanting to deal with what's at hand, things that I'm engaged with on a daily basis. With both the ArtForum and the New York Times, I like how the pages feel, and all those little peripheral marks on the edge of the pages. I'm interested in all of these things as physical objects. Q: The hand of the artist, and clear evidence of that, Francesca Pastine's ArtForum series of excavated magazines will be displayed at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito. seems paramount in your work. Why? A: I was very inspired by the women's art movement of the 1970s, which emphasized craft. I got into paper-cutting and paper crafts, and I liked cutting into them and trying to have the trace of my hand in the actual object. This brings the viewer to the present, into a richer experience of seeing. The viewer can have an embodied, visceral experience with the physical act of making when I bring that aspect forth. That's the reason I don't want to laser-cut them. Q: Can you talk about the pieces you'll have in the "Front + Center" show? A: There will be four of my ArtForum works (in which she cuts into the venerable art magazine). I consider them an archeological excavation, a dig. I'm digging through the current history of art making and stripping it and exposing it in a physical way, not an abstract way. The reason I was attracted to them was that they are square-shaped. A rectangle represents a portrait or landscape. But with a square, your eye kind of stops, it reads more as a real object. Q: You teach art at the college level, and have done so for much of your career. How does that feed back into your own art practice? A: I think it's important to get back to the fundamentals of art, to touch base with that all the time, so that you don't get too far into the conceptual realm. Through teaching, I go back to the reason that art's exciting for me in the first place. It's really gratifying to open up the possibility and potential of art on all levels. People get so much out of this experience; it's gratifying to see how people connect with creativity. Q: What's your favorite color? A: That I don't have - but I do love orange. Q: What is your most prized art possession? A: The art I have that was made by my parents. Q: What's the most inspiring thing you see daily? A: My first cup of coffee. Q: What one word best describes you as an artist? A: Dedicated. Q: What you would do if you didn't make things? A: There's really nothing else I can do. I'm hopeless at anything else. IF YOU GO What: Front + Center, a group exhibition guest-curated by Kimberly Johansson with featured artists: Francesca Pastine, Tamara Albaitis, Brice Bischoff, Todd Bura, Matty Byloos, Ajit Chauhan, Joshua Churchill, Lori Esposito, Mayumi Hamanaka, Taro Hattori, Rachel Mayeri, Jennie Ottinger, Erik Parra, Alison Pebworth, Tara Tucker, Paul Urich, Lindsey White, Noah Wilson, Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough and Ayelet Zohar. Where: Headlands Center for the Arts, 944 Fort Barry, third floor, Sausalito Christine Brenneman can be reached at lifestyles@marinij.com. The Working Artist column appears the second Thursday each month. ______________________________________________________________________________________________ http://flavorpill.com/sanfrancisco/search?search_query=francesca+pastine Front + Center The Headlands Center for the Arts' Residency Program has provided a removed perch for California artists, letting them draw on the Center's gorgeous natural surroundings and its past life as part of the military's Fort Barry. Front + Center — which alludes to both militaristic and theatrical forms of staging — finds local curatorial wunderkind Kimberly Johansson giving applicants from the 2009 program their chance to take center stage. The mixed-media show has many strong points, but Francesca Pastine's meticulously gutted issues of Artforum deserve an extra round of applause. – Matt Sussman ____________________________________________________________________________________ KQED ARTS Art of Democracy: War and Empire By Jennine Scarboro \| Oct 12, 2008 Politics are not subtle, political communication is necessarily fast, strident, and goal oriented. The best art on the other hand has a subtlety and an ambiguity that inspires contemplation and allows for multiple interpretations. I am very interested in the possibilities offered by the intersection of politics and art but, because the two practices are best formally presented in contradictory ways, it requires immense skill to balance the demands that each bring to a work. Art of Democracy: War and Empire at the Meridian Gallery had plenty of pieces that did not succeed, but among these I discovered works that did. As I looked I became aware that the work that most impressed me put art first and politics second. The best pieces in the show are Fernando Botero's painting Abu Ghraib #54 and Enrique Chagoya's litho and Chine-colle codex The Ghost of Liberty. Both of these works exhibit the inspired formal mastery of their makers. Botero's piece could at first seem to be an obvious illustration of the Abu Ghraib torture that horrified many in the US, and the world, in 2004. His painting however imbues the depiction with a sorrow and a livingness that invokes a powerful and different emotion from the one the photos evoked. As Kimmelman points out, "The photos of Abu Ghraib imply no outrage about what's happening. In fact, the intent of the pictures is precisely to compound the humiliation." These photographs of atrocities were taken by the instigators of the atrocities, and as a result our contemplation is focused on the barbarity of a viewer who will witness and record horrible acts without considering the humanity of his subjects. In opposition to this, Botero's work forces one to consider the humanity of this narrative's subjects. His figures are fleshy. The tender squishiness of their flesh emphasizes the brutality by which this flesh has been damaged making us feel them as fellow humans that suffer. I feel empathy for the sorrow of their pierced flesh, for their forced blindness, for the bindings that cut into their soft bodies. In Abu Grhaib #54, two figures are bound together in a dark barred cell. The cell that contains them has a strange slanting perspective. The way this warped perspective slides us down and out of the picture destabilizes the space emphasizing a strangeness and horror that adds to the painting's power. The figures are sympathetic, the space, the situation in which they exist, wrong. There is something about hope here too, a distant hope implied by narrow strip of light glowing in the oppressive darkness beyond double sets of cell bars. The omnipresence of hope is necessary for survival of dire and mundane trauma, and this slender strip speaks to me of the resonance of hope in human experience. Enrique Chagoya's The Ghost of Liberty differs in its approach both to content and to formal investigation. Rather than focusing on a specific event, Chagoya's piece is thematic. He creates a magical pastiche of oppression by giving us a sampling of "imperialist intervention" and "arbitrary exercise of violent power" as they occur in different places and at different times. While Botero utilizes the compositional manipulation of space and a sensitive rendering of the figures that instills them with symbolic meaning, rhythm, scale, color, and image complexity are the formally compelling aspects of Chagoya's work. Jesus-headed dinosaurs, Chinese-baby astronauts, Mayan gods, and Buddha heads, are printed in brilliant hues and collaged into a landscape of changing conflict. His hybrid forms are as inventive and delightful as his subject, the omnipresence of cultural violations, war, and political violence. The tension that holds these opposites together results in a very exciting piece. While I am most insistently drawn to work in which the formal qualities are most developed, occasionally a more conceptually focused piece will compel me. In The Past as Future, Habermas discusses what has happened, in the media, to depictions of war. He presents the idea that public opinion was affected by media images during Vietnam in a way that created difficulties for US politicians, and that as a result images of subsequent conflicts have been edited to reduce negative public opinion. Several more conceptually focused artworks intersected with these ideas in intriguing ways. Francesca Pastine's pieces from her series Iraqi Casualty Series were the most interesting of these. Three pages from the New York Times had all the text blacked out with graphite, leaving only barely recognizable images of covered bodies, coffins with a sprinkling of dirt, and a stack of diamond rings. Again the formal qualities are important to the success of the work although the emphasis here is on how they are used to present a criticality interesting idea. The density of the graphite darkness obliterates meaning, transforming information into unreadable black columns; censorship is an obvious implication and the resulting form speaks directly to ideas that our media, in this case the New York Times, is being edited obscuring truth as it reveals only partial events. The difficulty of identifying the imagery, which has had its surroundings erased by blackness, references the difficulty of comprehension when context is stolen from us. I was happy to find work in this show, which both compelled me as art and allowed me to ponder political themes in interesting ways that standard political communication does not usually engage. Art of Democracy: War and Empire is on display at the Meridian Gallery through November 4, 2008. For more information, visit meridiangallery.org. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________ The San Francisco Chronicle Kenneth Baker, May 31, 2008 Pastine at the Lab: Congratulations to Francesca Pastine for making Artforum involving again. Decades ago, in simpler times, people actually looked forward to reading the magazine, when it served as the New York art world's journal of record. Since then, Artforum has followed the trajectory of the art market itself, retailing moneyed glamour and the atmospherics of contemporary art. Meanwhile, most of the intellectual substance has shifted to its outrigger, Bookforum. Each issue of Artforum now boasts slab-like bulk and a power like kryptonite to drain the strength of any art professional who tries to face it. But in an ingenious series showing at the Lab, Pastine has found in the magazine the makings of memorable art, by means connected incidentally to Villeglé's practice. In "Artforums 2001: (Artforum Excavation Series)" (2008), she has meticulously carved a crater in a stack of 2001 issues. At one corner of the top cover - December - we can make out the remains of a tone-deaf banner: "Best of 2001." The hole Pastine has cut in the magazines, stratified with color from their glossy pages, irresistibly brings to mind the physical and emotional voids left by Sept. 11 massacres. In a related piece without obvious topical reference, she has cut an irregular hole - again looking something like a comic-book strip mine - into a single issue of the magazine, exposing a page apparently empty of all but a soft gray glow. In two other series here, Pastine has selectively effaced pages from the New York Times to expose not very deeply underlying contradictions, such as the collision of values in advertising and war news or fashions' real and ostensible values to the women who model them and those who covet them. Francesca Pastine: Alterations: Disfigured magazines and newspaper pages; The Lab, 2948 16th St., San Francisco. Ripping It Up SF WEEKLEY, By Hiya Swanhuyser, May 28, 2008 Francesca Pastine, Alterations: A 9B pencil is the softest pencil available: It's almost liquid. If it weren't made of lead it would make great eyeliner. An artist can choose to use a light touch with it, of course, but Francesca Pastine doesn't. At "Alterations," she shows three series, two of which involve the heavy application of graphite to newsprint, and one she made by slicing and curling Artforum magazines. She's interested in print publications, clearly. Back to the 9Bs: "Invisible Women" and "Iraqi Casualty" find Pastine layering their lead over pages of the New York Times in order to highlight certain images. The result reminds us of John Lennon's FBI file; the artist thinks it looks like "graphite leaf." Either way, her chosen photos stand out in a sea of darkest black while the paper's uncovered, datestamped edges remind the viewer of their official status. In the third series, "Artforum Excavations," exploded versions of the ultra-glossy last word in creative trends show an attitudinal, literal stab back at a publication that probably irritates a lot of artists. May 29-June 14, 2008
ORNAMENTATION, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, Artweek, March 2006, reviewed by David Buuck "Francesca Pastine's wonderful paint-objects combined a tactile engagement with paint and a sculptural approach to display that resulted in some of the strongest work in the show. Pastine paints canvases in thick, colorful oils, then cuts out segments and patterns, allowing them to hang down in patterns that upset conventional expectations of painting. Her Doorknob Cozy takes this further, by draping a large, patterned paint "skin" over a doorknob installed in a gallery wall, creating a useless adornment that carried uncanny power."
PHOTOO, Oakland Art Gallery, San Francisco Chronicle , August, 20 2005, reviewed by Kennith Baker "Francesca Pastine's work looks like something left over from a differnt show, but it makes a striking impression, especially her Football Cutouts . In each of these she has printed a sports page photo on Japanese inkjet paper, and with scissors or mat knife cut it into a frilly stencil, the incisions intervening comically or critically in the image."
The Big Tree Project Artweek, July/August, 2003 Previews, Debra Koppman "From a 23-inch diameter slice of the tree, Francesca Pastine created Reflect, a deep bluish-green, well-like ellipse. This space functioned both as a deep hole and as a site of reflection, creating an ambiguous boundary between the viewer and the work. As viewers see themselves and their environment mirrored in the work, they are invited to reflect upon their own relationships to the human and the not-human worlds in which they live."
Abstraction: Francesca Pastine, Paul Henry Ramirez, Jessica Snow and Amy Wilson New Work: Racheal Neubauer Rena Bransten Gallery November 21, 2002 - January 4, 2003 reviewed by Amy Berk, in WWW.STRETCHER.COM Lusciously erotic and formally inventive, the artworks in Abstraction , and New Work: Rachael Neubuer made a fantastic paring. The artists in both exhibition, one of painting and the other of sculpture, relish surface textures and utilize color playfully and gracefully, to great effect. Pastels pervade the galleries. Pause in the Landscape (2002), Jessica Snow's delightfully contained small acrylic painting, appears on target in size and chroma. Her larger work, Orbit (2002), seems less focused. Using white pins and yarn, the boxes of this painting continue off the panel and onto the wall, but the effect here is not as successful as her other efforts in a similar vein. Here, the combination of material, form and shadow lacks cohesion. Electrifying shadows activate two new works by Francesca Pastine. In Curl and Space Between Pink (both in 2002) Pastine uses a material close to my heart, Styrofoam, as a base for her tricky cut-outs. This cut-out treatment appears to pay homage to recent work by sister gallery artist Irene Pijoan, whose delicate paper cut-outs have been standouts in a rich gallery program. Pastine, however, employs painted aluminum, delicately slicing the material and pinning the intricate construction onto white Styrofoam. A deep velvety green unfurls behind a duller gray in Curl. More eroticism is present in the hairs, nipples and oozings of Paul Henry Ramirez's work. He presents two untitled works on paper, one from the Space Addiction series (2002) and one from the Edging into Excess series (1999). Ramirez effectively utilizes layering and texture in both works. The show is rounded out by two untitled graphite drawings by Pastine (2000) and a large oil painting by Amy Wilson. While they are strong works, they do not seem to fit well with the rest of the show's innovation and whimsy. In the next gallery, Rachael Neubauer presents physical manifestations of some of the ideas presented in paint in Abstraction . Her mixed media forms share highly polished surfaces and a strange sexual charge. All are precariously attached to the wall, save one lone floor piece, and a tension develops as one wonders when gravity will have its wicked way with these bulbous forms. Neubauer's fertile imagination continues to produce forms resonant with the body, bloated with desire, oddly inert, and fun. Her muted palette of blue, brown, mustard, taupe and green provides startling contrast to the jewel of the show In her first foray into bronze, Neubauer has created a Brancusian form with shadows galore whose reflective surface sparks an internal dialogue on content along with providing the pure enjoyment of its formal coherence, Lovely (and almost sold out) small drawings on photo paper further link her physical forms with the two dimensional language advanced in Abstraction. The pairing of these two beautifully nuance and balanced exhibitions is a treat for the senses.
Abstract, Racheal Neubauer and Chip Lord at Rena Bransten Artweek, February 2003, Volume 94, Issue 1 reviewed by Laura Richard Janku "Scalloping waves form boundaries between textured graphite and solid fields of yellow gouache or white paper in Francesca Pastine's two untitled drawings. In her lacy wall sculptures, negative and positive are interwoven in an intricate pattern of decoupage. Created from sheets of dried acrylic paint, the weighty tendrils tumble over themselves like bas relief seaweed, revealing innards and inner colors. The work is affixed with dress pins to plain white Styrofoam-- whose cellular pattern distracts more than it adds-- the skin of the paint draping down in a fabric like manner."
Surface Tension: Pattern Painting Gains Respect, Retrospective The Argus, The Review, The Tribune, The Herald, The Times Star reviewed by Monique Beeker "After studying some paintings by San Francisco artist Francesca Pastine, a woman who had spent most of the day scrubbing her bathtub told Pastine that she once experienced a revelation about the art she had seen. "They're about the invisibility of women's work." the woman said. The artist did not disagree. "I seek to make the invisible seen, and the visible submerged." Pastine writes in an artist's statement posted alongside her work in Surface Tension. "As in traditional women's work that requires a care and attentiveness often overlooked, the details within paintings become subsumed into the whole." The steel canvases she favors feature rounded corners and edges tucked under as neatly as linens tucked between mattresses. The potential coldness of the surface, however, is warmed by the organic forms she depicts. In "Silver Lining: (2001), Pastine paints three wandering rows of flowers with diaphanous pastel petals dancing in space. No single bloom is distinct from it's neighbors. rather, they overlap and create a connected whole."
The Stranger Vol. 9, No. 5 October 21-27, 1999 Page 39 DOMESTIC MINIMALISM Kustom Kitchen Kulture by Erick Fredericksen FRANCESCA PASTINE is a San Francisco Artist whose work seems Southern California: L.A. cool, not S.F. funk; 20th century L.A., not 19th Century S.F. Her paintings, now showing in the cramped back hallway at James Harris Gallery, start with a smooth sheet of industrial stainless steel, its edges folded over into smooth, rounded edges. She paints directly onto the metal, without gesso, undercoat, or any other preparation. Really looking at the surface of this material is revelatory for anyone who, for reasons of inebriation or just mental tiredness, has found himself contemplating the top of a garbage can would testify. Gray, silver, or black in spots-- depending on lighting and variations in the surface-- the steel carries a cool glow with glimmering, jewel-like highlights. Respecting her materials, Pastine paints only lightly on this surface, leaving much of it exposed. Pastine's painting hand is loose yet tidy, covering the sheet with repeated forms which range from thin, wavering lines to small, stenciled blots that resemble potato prints. There are links with mid-century art, from the minimalist grid loosely laid over one of Silent Treatment's (1999) two panels to the abstract, expressionist influenced composition of a 1998 untitled work--but I wouldn't make a simple equation out of this fact. Pastine's work draws as much from the vernacular culture of post-war America as from its art specifically, Kustom Kulture auto pinstriping, and kitchen and bathrooms. The kitchens and the bathrooms are the easiest to tease out. Pastine's colors tend toward pale pink, avocado green, sky blue and bright yellow--all colors associated with '60s refrigerators, ovens, sinks and tiles. Her forms are similarly domestic: little heart shapes arranged in flower-petal-like groups of five in Silent Treatment and Flutter (1998), a budding tree branch form in Untitled (1996), and a curving, single line shape in the left panel of Untitled (1998) that resembles both a loose rubber band (seen as a line), and the sandpapery, flower-shaped stick-ons that keep you from slipping and bonking your head in the tub (seen as a solid). The pinstriping reference is probably unintentional, but it's there in the sleek, thin line of her brush, in the curves of that line, in the shininess of her metal support. But it's a loose link: Pinstripers tend to take simple shapes of images and work them into baroque, vibrating, barely readable forms composed of many curving, crossing lines, while Pastine's complexity comes from overlapping simple shapes. it's two different sorts of blur. The common ground is found in a much larger tradition of decorative arts--call it "more is more." Pure description and plainness are enemies of this tradition, which loves detail and richness. Pastines's diptychs tend to contrast feminine and masculine forms. The aforementioned Silent Treatment has the little heart shapes next to a steel sheet covered in a grid of spindly lines, like country home stencil-shapes matched up with graph paper. But Pastine's grid is not strict: formed of loose, slightly wavering lines, it brings to mind Agnes Martin's delicate, human--and feminine--minimalist drawings. Pastine's positioning is remarkable, poised at the intersection of two large art trends: feminized minimalism with no taste of of brutal machismo, and minimalism which refers to the world outside of the hermetic discourse of art. Which should lead me out of the art and into that world, I suppose, but it doesn't. This is not disappointing to me, though. Pastine's real-world references are important to her art, but it's less fun to think about those connections than it is to simply revel in the beauty of the work. Suspended Belief (1999) uses a thin lined form looking like a closed eyelid or part of a radiant sun: a dipping horizontal curve with rays extending from its bottom. Pastine's hand is evident in these shapes, in the way the rays or eyelashes trail off from thicker beginnings. A second panel is covered in pale blue: the color of sky when your eyes are open, not the blood-red you see through those closed eyelids. This painting also uses the mid-century domestic colors of her other work--yellow, pink, light blue--but feels more outdoorsy. Its references are less specific, which makes it more satisfying because you don't have to think about it as much. You can just let your open eyes glance over the icons representing closed eyes, or rest them on the cool blue of the painting's other half. Just beautiful.
	SERENDIPITY curated by Anna Kunz & Leslie Baum artists: Leslie Baum Molly Briggs Fandra Chang Pamela Fraser Carrie Gundersdorf Portia Hein Laura Henke Gosia Koscielak Amma Kunz Julie Ledgerwood Teresa Mucha Melissa Oresky Francesca Pastine Sue Scott Amy Self Stephanie Serpick Amy Theobald Shirley Tse

Spread: Rena Bransten Gallery, Flash Art: October 1998 reviewed by Reena Jana "Hung nearby were visually stunning works that straddled both the real and the abstract...Francesca Pastine's gorgeous gouaches, including the ethereal Untitled, which featured delicate renditions of false eyelashes painted in irridiscent colors."