Opening: Jerome Lagarrigue at Patrick Painter Inc.

“Self Portrait in Blue and Maroon”: 36” x 36” oil on linen. Courtesy of the artist

Jerome Lagarrigue: Dreams & Descendance

Patrick Painter Inc. 

September 21 - October 22, 2019

By WM, October 2019

Jules' (son) 50” x 50” oil on linen. Courtesy of the artist

“Lillian as a younger woman”: 59”x 59” oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist

PRESS RELEASE: 

Patrick Painter Inc. is pleased to present DREAMS & DESCENDANCE, a solo exhibition featuring works by Jerome Lagarrigue. Jerome Lagarrigue’s latest work is the manifestation of an obsession with family. These paintings of his relatives range from literal to figurative and even imagined, spanning generations, cultures, races, and continents. Some are abstract and reference less, constructed from memory. Others have been plucked from family photographs, in many cases old ones: a tiny photo booth print of his father as a young man, his Harlem raised African American mother standing behind her white Parisian in-laws. After deep reflection and engagement with such photos, Lagarrigue calls them “encounters”, he extracts the details that intrigue him the most, enlarges them, reconfigures and recontextualizes them, invents riots of wild color where there had been none. These are his people, the myriad facets of his experience, lifted out of place, time memory. Generations are blurred, context vanishes. With each of these intense, emotionally-charged paintings, Lagarrigue is crafting an alternative narrative of his family’s past, present and future: his side of the story. WM