Patrick Carroll at The Assembly

“Commonplacing,” Patrick Carroll’s first solo exhibition in New York Metropolis, presents textual content items that probe the poetic and political tensions between language, tradition, and visibility. Every conceptually pushed work contains a finely knit panel emblazoned with particular person phrases or phrases, stretched round a picket body. Their geometric austerity is avowedly Minimalist, as a result of the texts are enclosed inside a singular block of potent coloration. Tonal variations allow his “statements” to both glow in good distinction to their mesh-like helps or softly murmur to the viewer. These grounds produce a transparency that invitations the body, staples, and screws to play a job in every work’s delicate ensemble. This high quality of porosity permits his compositions to keep up each a declarative palpability and a swish half presence.

Carroll’s poignant textual choices, made up of direct quotations or self-devised idioms, are marked by a lyrical openness. They thematize the need for and disavowal of legibility, usually in relationship to homosexual cultural kinds. In Homocanon (all works 2023), the phrase APOCRYPHA, which refers to written paperwork of questionable veracity, is rendered with rainbow-striped lettering. Using the time period as a metaphor, Carroll’s playfully on-the-nose Delight coloration induces a celebratory impact, honoring the choice, usually esoteric, historical past of homosexual life whereas underscoring the tragedy of exclusion. The piece Bona Nochy reads “POLARI UNIVERSITY,” a reference to the secretive avenue slang Polari, as soon as spoken by homosexual males and different social delinquents to evade the legislation and heterosexual society. Carroll highlights the generative prospects of in-group linguistic obscurity along with his high-camp suggestion for a college of cant.

Analogously, the permeability of the knits mimics the incompleteness of all language as expression—the way in which by which a system of illustration can by no means wholly articulate the “factor” itself. However by way of queer tradition, Carroll fashions illustration right into a software, to realize, as said within the work Machine, a LIBERATION FROM DRUDGERY.

— Evan Lincoln