Pastine Projects is pleased to inaugurate our new space with works of San Francisco artists Eva Bovenzi, Prajakti Jayavant, Francesca Pastine, and Jessica Snow. Their work, developed over decades, balances shape, line, and color to create paintings that synthesize thought and process into form.  Each artist has created an idiosyncratic and nuanced visual vocabulary that uses personal narratives or experience to translate sensation and memory into the visual language of abstraction. The paintings on view embody the conceptual and aesthetic rigor of their processes and demonstrate a continuing will to challenge definitions of painting.

Jayavant has an expansive interpretation of painting and drawing that encompasses the interaction and materiality of paper and paint. By stressing color and shape to their limits, her paintings become unique objects whose components interact with themselves, their environment, and the viewer. Jayavant’s physical process of doing and undoing, folding, bending, and scraping result in animated works that mimic their making.

Bovenzi’s paintings aim to give visible form to that which is not visible. Influenced by the natural world and the art of various spiritual traditions, Bovenzi makes work that is both powerful and enigmatic.  Studying the visual language of traditions as various as  pre-Renaissance western painting, Indian miniatures, Tantric images, and Native American art, she has internalized their space, shapes and colors to create images that express the universal and personal truths that ground her work.

Francesca Pastine begins her GEM paintings by creating layers of inchoate washes on paper that mirror her inner state of searching. Enlarged and abstracted silkscreens of diamonds and planets are then added to impose order and a sense of connection. Visual signifiers, both real and invented, intersect suggesting an alchemic conversion of elements. The works in her Diamonds series remain an abstraction of line and color that create a sense of coming-into-being through opposing forces.



Jessica Snows started her Confluence – Still Life series during shelter-in-place and gradually realized she was “trying to hold form in place, objects in a quiet space, and myself in the same state.” Through her engagement in the interior space of her home, common place objects transcend their utility and become poetic expressions of form and space.

The works in this exhibition range from the deeply symbolic to the notational. Each painting is approached singularly with the weight of experience and process, evoking a liminal space between recognition and surprise.