Patrick Alston, Untitled Blue (Cannes Bay), 2024, acrylic, gouache, oil and oil stick on canvas, 50 x 60 cm. Courtesy the artist
Through abstraction, Alston makes his presence felt without opening it up to racial categorisation; the liberation associated with gestural forms gains undeclared political meaning. During the residency, Alston has been working mainly on two paintings, one predominantly red, the other yellow: naïf, slowly churning suspensions of crosshatched, whirling marks that decelerate the fleetingness of preverbal emotion; the preverbal as prepolitical, or pretraumatic, which is not to say that Alston’s practice is one of pseudo-utopian escape. Rather than shy away from reality, his layering and blending of marks seem to carry out the palimpsestic, perpetual (because it’s perpetually thwarted) practice of sustaining a prelapsarian world. Before coming here, I wondered if my Edenic surroundings wouldn’t desensitise me to the harshness of life, but maintaining such indifference would be like meditating indefinitely without a single intrusive thought. It seems to me that the labour in Alston’s work – which is often evocative of a beautiful garden, his work on the Jenkins Johnson Gallery stand at Art Basel this year, Remember the Lilies (2024), even referencing Monet – is up against an equally inevitable rupture of innocence.
