Patti Oleon

Lives and works in San Francisco, CA

Artist statement

I create paintings from photographs I take of public interiors—hotel and apartment lobbies, museum period rooms, and television and movie sets: spaces designed to appear inhabited yet conspicuously devoid of human presence. Working from these images, I digitally manipulate, layer, crop, and reconfigure the original scenes before translating them into oil paintings using traditional Old Master techniques of underpainting, glazing, and layering. The resulting works occupy a space between documentation and invention. Although rendered with great detail, the interiors are altered digitally through shifts in perspective, overlays of multiple versions of the same scene, mirroring and inverting color, and interventions of light. Through these transformations, a plausible interior can become psychologically strange and spatially impossible. Familiar architectural spaces become difficult to locate, identify, or fully comprehend. Their specificity of detail suggests something knowable, while their dislocation undermines that certainty, creating the sensation of a place encountered in memory or dreams—simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar. Light plays a central role in the paintings, simultaneously affirming and destabilizing the reality of objects and space. It illuminates, obscures, fragments, and redirects attention, creating environments that feel at once convincing and uncertain. Through successive transformations, the original spaces become amalgams of interior and exterior,...

Artwork