Juxtapoz Magazine - Hyacinth Canyon: Joshua Petker @ Anat Ebgi Gallery, Los Angeles

"The convergence of history and imagination unites Petker's practice, which treats painting as a site of overlapping realities. Across large and medium scale canvases, layered and interlocking figures share a frame, yet retain a charged, separate relationship to each other. Ghostlike impressions, statuesque nudes, and wandering outlines of beasts and smiles seem at once animated and permanently fixed, arrested by a skin of paint. Here Petker treats the present tense as composite: histories, jokes, and devotions convene as a simultaneous multi-subjective reality."

"Simultaneity registers as a metaphor for our times. Courtly decorum and comic interruption share the same picture plane. Identity and archetype behave like collage, as convergent stacks of roles that never settle into singularity. Desire and discipline move as mutually dependent currents through these avatars of contemporary ascension. Whether in a grand promenade portrait or a crowded tavern of layered subjects, the painted surface operates like a proscenium, where allegory, memory, and revision overlap rather than resolve."

"Petker's chromatically intense palette is a structuring device, setting the order of attention. Ice blue, burning orange, and punctuating cadmiums direct the eye rhythmically across the canvas. Suggesting a sort of anarchic freedom, limbs and costumes splice, silhouettes echo and contradict, outlines double back, tracing a choreography of alternate poses and time scales. Varying expressions of line, color, and rendering sit together; revisions, rub"

Hyacinth Canyon draws on the Greek story of beauty, rivalry, and metamorphosis and a fanciful California canyon where time folds on itself. Painting functions as a site of overlapping realities. Large and medium canvases contain layered, interlocking figures that share a frame while retaining charged separation. Ghostlike impressions, statuesque nudes, and wandering outlines of beasts and smiles appear animated and permanently fixed beneath a skin of paint. The works treat the present tense as composite, where histories, jokes, and devotions convene into a simultaneous, multi-subjective reality. Simultaneity operates as metaphor: identity and archetype stack like collage, and allegory, memory, and revision overlap.

Read at Juxtapoz