If someone wanted to send you a postcard from hell, Patrick Welch would be the best living candidate to paint it. But it might make you want to visit. Welch’s hell is goofy, cryptic, fairly self-aggrandizing, and inviting. In his new show of nearly 100 tiny acrylic paintings, cute little science fiction nightmares drift across wistful reddish skies at dusk; scenes of pulp horror, medical illustrations, and sedate bits of clip art float across backgrounds of cool blues and browns. In a series entitled “United in Their Hatred of Patrick W. Welch,” famous contemporary artists like Gerhard Richter, Ed Ruscha, and Komar and Melamid wear awkward space suits and hang around outside his house, ganging up to urinate on him and kick his ass.
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“I’m trying to make visual that notion that many of us have, that we’re both the biggest idiots in the world and geniuses at the same time,” says Welch, whose first solo show of paintings opened last week at Gescheidle (there’s a reception Friday, September 13, from 6 to 9). “Although they’re urinating on me and stabbing me and hanging me, at least they’re paying attention. It deals with wanting to do well–this body of work acknowledges that at least I’ve attained enough notoriety to have gotten these guys’ attention. But then they come back at me with urine.”
His subject matter belies how much fun his paintings are to approach and squint at. “The fact that the postcards of these paintings are the same size as the originals–I love that,” he says. “It forces the viewer to have an intimate relationship with it. If you’re the vaguest bit interested you have to go up close, and once you go up close I think I’ve got you.”
