De Kooning’s remark, he’s quoting Kierkegaard, that “purity of heart is to will one thing”, has often seemed more cryptic than enlightening. But it’s a practical observation: to get to the essence of your relationship to your art, your life as an artist, you must explore one thing deeply -as De Kooning did “woman”.
Pat Boyer has always described objects in the world, through large gestures which might seem the opposite of concentration, but the gestures have always been in the service of exploring one thing in depth. For most of her career it has been the human figure coalescing out of generous mark-making. Lately, though her focus has become even narrower: an edifice which has come to fascinate her, the Coliseum in Verona, Italy, built by the Romans in the 4th century AD. The essential shape of a coliseum lends itself to Boyer’s tendency toward amplitude in her drawing. Ellipses signify capaciousness even more than circles do. And the ellipse works because it isn’t perfect; it can be played with, greatly distorted without being destroyed. A coliseum is innately rambunctious if you consider the kinds of activity that went on inside. The Verona Coliseum was the site of a Bacchic festival, whose date corresponded to the present-day Shrove Tuesday or Mardi Gras.
The choice of this antique subject wasn’t a totally conscious one, although Boyer spends part of every summer in Italy. Italian architectural themes have persisted in her work, but the Coliseum might be linked to something so basic to human nature, that the first impulse might be to dismiss it. Boyer says that the shape might have come out of the practice of doodling on a telephone pad, the kind of rudimentary art made by anyone who’s stuck on the phone but with a pencil handy. The common form this nonchalant, absent-minded doodling takes is repeated shapes, and round, interlinked ones are frequent.
It is one of the wonders of art making that something as weighty as this series of Coliseum works can have its genesis in something so insignificant. But such seeming unimportance has figured strongly in the history of 20th century art, most notably in Dada and Automatism, modes which depended strongly on psychology. But another rather obscure, yet vivid source for Boyer’s architectural work might lie in a primary childhood experience. Her father was an optometrist but also, she says, a dreamer. He envisioned houses he would like to build and he took his family around the country with him as he brought these houses to reality. The notion that architecture and building should occupy a central point in one’s life might have taken root in Boyer then.
Boyer’s Coliseum work is multifarious. What gives it focus and unity is the persistent ellipse that figures in each incarnation of the building. Sometimes Boyer presents what is essentially an aerial view, and frequently lines adumbrating the central shape give it a kind of alacrity as if it is spinning or whirling. Sometimes the rows of repeating arches on the arena’s face are the focus, and this repetition often gets lively as if the arches are a crowd of people, maybe the apparitions of those who once filled the coliseum at festival time. Even when an image strays far from the boldly declarative and becomes enigmatic and personal, there is the sense of a place haunted with memories.
Boyer uses a variety of media to create these works, but her colors usually partake of earth or terra cotta-like that instantly put a viewer in mind of a monument from the past that has survived. She continues to explore the human figure; another subject is fading flowers, but the Coliseum is especially rich, not only for its novelty but because it is large enough to contain everything else.
—William Zimmer, New York City, 1999
William Zimmer is a contributing critic for The New York Times.