Reflections in a Silver Eye,
Gerrit Henry, Summer 1999, New York City; For Exhibition at Tatischeff Gallery.

 

Reflections in a Silver Eye
For a good many years now, Jeanette Pasin Sloan has been known for the high formality and finish of her still life canvases. In setups that defy any logic but their seemingly preordained, subliminally profound own, Reverware is found standing, or fallen next to cheap plastic silver cups; Faberware coffeepots are mixed in with tackily glistening goblets; and supra-handsome Heller coffee mugs find their place among tony silver cigarette boxes. Backgrounds are equally vivid, and varied: Pasin Sloan's high style material-fetishes are to be seen against Navajo rugs, or ultra-bold striped fabrics, or even zebra-striped ones. Home, after all, is where the art is.

And, yes, there is a good deal of formal and conceptual polish to the work. All of Sloan's paintings are executed technically within an inch of their lives – the artist makes forty or fifty color slides per setup, then goes about microscopically masking over areas in the slide she doesn't want included in the finished product, constantly referring to the photos as she paints. For this dedication to the "real" she is often called a Photo-Realist; what this term – and the contention that she is a mere formalist – overlooks is the fact that Pasin Sloan's is a unique quest for beauty, not particularly a goal of orthodox Photo-Realists. With Sloan, the goal goes past mere reproduction: he search is for beauty bare and bizarre, even maybe a bit benighted.

The beauty part? In each of her paintings, shiny surfaces reflect, refract, and deflect either the larger interiors in which she is painting: or other more anonymous objects close-up or nearby; or even outdoor scenes caught through a window. Sloan's metallic waverings writhe and wriggle, coalesce and collide, until a kind of seductive but unidentifiable distortion becomes the visual order of the day, beyond the picturesque or reportorial, into the realm of the everyday sublime.

The fine madness to her method is also to be encountered in the nude self-portraits (upper body only) that edged their way into Pasin Sloan¹s work in the early 90's. Throughout, woman – beautiful in her blunt, factual presence – is presented as the reflective animal, self-conscious, but bold, distracted, but determined. The self-portraits are sere, elegant metaphysical psychodramas that confront painter with self and viewer with painter (confronting, further, painter with some hypothetical viewer) all there alone, mirrored and mirroring, daring one another to stand down.

And, in her latest – the "Balancing Act" series, in which Pasin Sloan returns to the purer sort of life – a beautiful chaos is manifested to a fare-thee-well. Typical Pasin Sloan still-life objects are stacked upon one another on tables in gravity and reality defying feats of plastic acrobatics; what is physically extraordinary becomes the psychologically ordinary. Pasin Sloan, in the "Balancing Acts," discovers a new order of existence, where a human wish is the only visible means of support, and where balancing acts stand in handsomely and supremely for the sort of feats we all routinely go though to get to the end of the day – and night.

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