Who doesn’t love looking at the sky? We live in LA after all, didn’t we invent that? Los Angeles made The Sky a Star and proceeded to name a street after her. In this sense, Partridge’s paintings are portraits—of her Majesty, the blue beyond—par excellence. The impact is felt immediately upon entering the room—like walking into a Turrell room, except that Partridge reverses the terms: achieving this sense of over-arching clarity/nuance through intuitive, painterly means, rather than a Minimal/Conceptual framing device.

Patrick Zapien, writing in Caesure says this about Turrell:

And yet Snow and Turrell have an undeniable coldness about them, their work hemmed in by the very forms of mediation that allow for their evocative power. Both Snow’s edited zoom and Turrell’s pre-programmed light show betray a structuralism that leaves subjectivity largely unaddressed.

Partridge’s work is an attempt to invest this subject with just such subjectivity. Partridge’s own writing consciously engages with this duality: specifically, she writes about the concept of the “Metamodern,” and her interest in connecting the Romantic notion of the sublime to contemporary conceptual art strategies and relating the Modern to the Postmodern. (I’m paraphrasing it quite generally but her essay is worth reading. I only bring this up because her seriousness about theorizing her own work is a good reason to take her work seriously—and because it consciously runs afoul of some contemporary landscape painting strategies.)

This show felt like an installation even though it was just large canvases, all the same size, hung at regular intervals. These have a incredibly subtle surfaces married to sharp focus clarity which is really unusual. It’s like how the sky itself contains ineffably specific gradients while expressing only the hyper-specific logical clarity of its own presence. Photography can’t really ever capture the sky itself, nor can it capture these paintings.