About the work

Occupying a position that transcends the figuration/abstraction binary, the works instead function as a layered index of their own creation. Marks, erasures, elisions and obfuscations accumulate in anxious accretions of oil paint and achieve completion only as they are fully wrestled. This effort results in surfaces where a viewer can engage with all of the tumult in an instant, where colours vie for supremacy, where glimpses of recognition meet with obliterating, formal blocks.

Pestoni both covers his tracks and leaves fingerprints all over the place. In some cases, the component marks seem to be stacked on one another in an unruly pile, each gesture peeking out from behind the one atop it. Elsewhere, recurring hacking hashmarks crisscross more stable areas of color creating fissures through the strata of painterly endeavour. In the end, while the painting is the resultant object, the paintings’ subject is time, exertion and the methodology of their construction.

About the artist

JON PESTONI’s (b. 1969 St. Helena, California) recent group exhibitions of note include Rosebud, Matthew Marks Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2019); Trace of Existence, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2016); Alone Together, Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL (2013); Real Simple, selections from the collection of Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg, Riverview School, East Sandwich, MA (2013). In 2016, Pestoni presented a solo exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art. His paintings are a part of numerous institutional collections including The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Cleveland Museum of Art; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Rennie Collection, Vancouver, Canada; Rubell Family Collection, Miami; 

Sammlung Goetz, Munich; and Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing.

More work by Jon Pestoni