Containers or structures split apart and fracture, their walls resting on each other, mirroring themselves, and angling into the suggestion of other spaces in Tommy Fitzpatrick's newest paintings. At once citing architectural forms--the paintings are called Aedicule, Bascule, Monolith, Pavilion--and invoking the entrance of the figure, Fitzpatrick teases our sureness of where we are, what we know, and how we see. What happens if the walls our senses try to describe become transparent, reflective, or unstable? Looking to Josef Albers's lectures on color and perception, Fitzpatrick alludes to a contemporary moment in which even seemingly stable knowledge is called into question. "In visual perception a color is almost never seen as it really is — as it physically is," Albers writes in his 1963 experimental guide Interaction of Color, "In order to use color effectively it is necessary to recognize that color deceives continually.”
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