Patrick McGarry
by Michael Workman

Patrick McGarry paints as an admiration of memory, an apprehension of the fleeting images and binding moments in lived experience. Whereas some are content to merely drive the metaphoric car of daily life, McGarry wants to get under the hood and tinker with the engine. His subjects are those "things you see everyday without thinking about," but upon which the smooth functioning of human existence depends. Depicted allegorically in his painting, each oil on wood acts to renew and situate remembered mental states at the complex core of a wide range of cultural phenomena, represented in his early work as sections in a grid of canvases set between black squares of varied heights. These incidental moments act in the imagination as correlates–a seaplane, parachutes descending into a body of water–that demonstrate the bonds of trust that are his primary concern.

As represented in his large-scale paintings, these scraps of memory coalesce into scenes of personal validation. Three bikinied girls float on a black inner tube; an Asian man frolicks in a pool with a woman's thighs draped around his neck and a frothy pint in hand; the artist's grandmother looks back over her shoulder as she rides a carousel. These moments of social gregariousness, idle pleasure and familial longing are portraits of the indescribable emotion contained in shared attitudes toward family, friendship, love. Each instance simultaneously frames the pictured history with an uneasy reflection on the impossible need for escape from the shared peril of our fallen state.