Hilary Pecis opens her home and studio to visitors. She takes one into the lives of her neighbors as well without so much as a person in sight—but what lives, and what a life.
Once you have been inside, you may never want to leave. You never could take it all in, not when her compositions run every which way and there is so much to see. It gives new meaning to “pattern and decoration” in painting, without an unbroken pattern and with too many specifics in time and place to write it off as decoration. Now if only you could be sure that you would not stand out like a sore thumb, at David Kordansky through October 12.
Pecis deals not just in sunlight, but in sensation. She brings you close to share the intimacy and outside to take in the view. Cats glare back, as cats do, but so near that they could almost be in your lap—or you in theirs if only they had one. Books fill shelf after shelf, and you may want to step past the flowers to inventory every title. Besides, books, too, can be an arrangement of shapes and colors. So can coffee cups, tablecloths, chair cushions, and the furniture to hold it all.
The bursts of sensation keep coming on a front lawn where trees and flowers compete with the architecture, white stones on red soil, and each other. Here, it would seem, people celebrate Christmas year round, to judge by a plastic Madonna and shepherds. But no, this is LA or an ideal version of it, where welcoming warmth and sunlight last through December. Still, a New Yorker would recognize the signs of home. The shepherds could pass for family by the porch waiting to see you, like Brooklynites on a stoop. Just one painting leaves home entirely, but there, too, for a single destination—and the shop sells flowers.
“Pattern and Decoration” arose in the 1970s as one more nail in Minimalism’s coffin. Artists like Valerie Jaudon and Miriam Schapiro combined feminism and excess. It also proclaimed painting’s special nowhere, where patterns matter more than what they cover. Pecis, in contrast, stuck to Southern California, but also to a sense of place. It seems only right that the flower shop gives its phone number on the awning. You could look up the area code online for a map of LA. You could look to the books, with an enviable choice of artists and philosophers, for a reminder of who you are.
Of course, they also define a class—a class of readers, but also of buyers. If the coffee cups have a further clash of geometry and color, you can assume that smart shoppers brought them home. These shoppers keep up with contemporary design and have the money to do so. But you could see that from the homes themselves, from the breadth of a porch and gabled roof to an alluring stairwell broken by shadows. I could easily feel guilty about belonging there. I may not live like this, but I do love the right artists and have read the right books.
Pecis can seem a lightweight—and ready confirmation of one’s suspicions about money in art. The show opened the week of New York art fairs, with their display of wealth. Still, she is not taking the easy way out. Maybe the movement artists better known in New York would look less comforting if they shared her sense of place. Her very wildness disrupts a skeptical narrative as well. The flower shop has its own profusion of signs and samples.