Richard Patterson: Paintings from Dallas    Oct 22 - Nov 19, 2005

Throughout his career, Patterson has reproduced in paint, with phenomenal exactitude, subjects as diverse as motocrosser bikes, minotaurs, soldiers, television characters and cheerleaders. By removing these items from a recognisable context and placing them in alien, abstract landscapes, they are at once imbued with pathos and also opened to new interpretation. In the painting, Backyard Ritual,Patterson depicts a green, gun-toting, plastic, cowboy figurine against a luminous expanse of grass. Although, the potent symbolism of the cowboy is inescapable, Patterson's elevation of a once tiny toy to a hyper-real, or even surreal, monumental figure flouts expectation and understanding.

In the painting Road Agent, a C19th American term for a bandit or highwayman, Patterson returns to his signature motif of daubing an actual plastic figurine with paint, photographing it and rendering the image exactly on canvas. The cowboy of Backyard Ritual has been transformed, cloaked in swathes of colour, now unrecognisable, a looming and somewhat sinister presence. Its features hidden, it transcends easy interpretation and is simultaneously readable as purely abstract form.

This coexistence of form and content is particularly apparent in the canvas, Reef Girl, in which Patterson takes a blob of paint as his focus. A deceptively simple composition of creamy coloured paint that both exemplifies the artist's technical ability and illustrates his fascination with his medium. Patterson creates an illusion of sensuous, liquid paint. Mysterious and vital, this sculpted mass seems erotically charged; perhaps suggestive of the curve of a thigh.

Like Richard Hamilton's collage, Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? of 1965, the 'collaged' layers of Patterson's 'culture station' paintings create a dense and complex space, at once real and yet impossible. An artifice echoed in the inclusion of lettering. Visually referencing advertising and billboards, Patterson's compositions echo the canvases of for example, Lichtenstein and Ruscha, and affirm his pop art mantle. Back at the Dealership Culture Station no. 5 is a monumental and complex composition. A portrait of the artist poses confidently, staring directly at the viewer, enigmatic behind dark shades. Almost life size, Patterson seems confrontational: casually placed beside a shiny red Toyota truck, a vehicle indigenous to his new home of Dallas. However, the perspective lines that encase him, grid-like, lead the eye, not to an imaginary vanishing point, but to a pistol, encased in gun holster adorning a naked female thigh. Patterson seems suddenly over shadowed, vulnerable; less prepossessed. The gun, a symbol of power, virility and violence, inescapably American, becomes the dominant protagonist.

For the first time in his career, Patterson will show a series of collaged, unique drawings. Assimilating images gleaned from advertising, the internet, media and his own photographs, Patterson uses these studies as a way of researching and developing his ideas and final compositions.

Richard Patterson was born 1963. He graduated from Goldsmiths in 1986. Group exhibitions have included Freeze, Surrey Docks, London (1988); Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection, Royal Academy of Arts, London (1997); The Rowan Collection, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland (2002) and Painting Pictures, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany (2003). Solo exhibitions have included Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London (1997), James Cohan Gallery, New York (1999 and 2002), and Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas (2000).

A catalogue with an essay by Matthew Collings will accompany the exhibition. Timothy Taylor Gallery is at 24 Dering Street, London W1S 1TT, and is open 10-6pm Mon-Fri;10-1pm Sat. For further information please contact Joanna Thornberry or Lee Johnson. Tel: 020 7409 3344 or e-mail: mail@timothytaylorgallery.com