3 Têtes Au Bandeau Bleu 2007

Patrick Pietropoli’s ‘3 Têtes Au Bandeau Bleu’ is a wide, dark painting of three bathers. I can imagine him, brush in hand, smearing on the thick, chalky paint to create these figures. They are pale against the darkness, with their blue-ish eyes and the white headbands wrapped around their heads. See how the paint seems to drip down from their necks? It reminds me of Cecily Brown's figures, which emerge and dissolve from a sea of marks. What was Pietropoli thinking when he painted them? Were they friends, or muses, or figments of his imagination? Each face seems to look off in different directions. The girl on the left looks back over her shoulder, the girl in the centre stares right at us, and the girl on the right looks away. It makes me think about how painting can be an ongoing conversation – artists looking and learning from each other, across time and space. Painting is an embodied expression, an embrace of ambiguity. There’s no one way to read it.