Jeff Pastorek is a native of New Orleans. This show continues his interest in storytelling about his City through night scenes and costumes, while adding new subjects. Paintings include ruminations on freedom, consumption, and decadence. — Our relationship to animals is a theme throughout (oink, moo, neigh, tweet tweet, blah blah blah:).

“These days we’re forever being told how tough times are and how they may get tougher. Living in New Orleans, we’re used to being surrounded by entropy we can see. In fact, many of us fall in love with an acceptable amount of wear in the buildings and objects around us. It becomes our responsibility, I suppose, to decide what is an acceptable—or even good—amount of deterioration. (Does this look ‘antique’ or does it look disposed of? Does it fall into one or the other category for some of us or for all of us?) Similarly, when we have the freedom of loose rules, it becomes our responsibility to determine for ourselves what is an acceptable amount of fun. And what is too much… . These are the types of themes I’ve been thinking about, at the same time thinking about how to present the images that pop into my head in a form that is more relatable—less obscure, I hope! What came out was visions of fun and a metaphor for the crossroads of beauty and freedom and delicious excess. Birds on fast food.”

“Why Gouache? I love the look of the matte finish of the paint, and I love its forgiving nature. My process involves a great deal of planning but also a great deal of re-arrangement as I work on a painting and see the way the new colors could complement or that the composition seems to need a balance shift. Improvisation can be critical. And with gouache, each layer can be covered by a new layer, roughly removed, or, best case of all, blended with new paint to fix or embellish until the painting is (subjectively) perfect.”

“Returning to themes: ‘I Agree With You’ seemed like a way to capture the interpersonal balance involved in the group decision-making process about what is acceptable (acceptable deterioration, acceptable costuming, acceptable fun, acceptable food). ‘I Agree With You’ is at once a sentiment of getting along, of affection, and of giving in. Do you see it this way too? If so, then I Agree With You.“

There are times when one must live life off the grid. Taking a break from the rigid compositions of “People and How They Feel About Animals” and “Time &Stuff,” these pieces look at New Orleans through its defining characteristics and architecture. Some pieces feature devils tempting and suffering at the hands of indomitable residents; some feature floating, spooky heads representing man-made dangers that chase its locals; some feature costumed individuals assisting or thwarting their neighbors. Medium: gouache on paper.

It’s us against them. We evolved just like they did, but we evolved big brains and standing-on-two-leggedness. So we won. Fair and square. … Look—which one of us invented clothes? Us or animals?! Exactly! And which one of us sleeps out in the rain?! Ok, well some people do. Bad example… Ok, well, which one of us would win a fight: a person with a gun or a chimpanzee with a gun?! … Look … I feel like you get what I mean … We won!

Simple compositions of grids of human and animal heads on plain fields of color—but the relationships between the subjects themselves are knotty and complicated. Masks, costumes, superheroes, and celebrities make appearances in these examinations of the human/animal relationship during this complex age. Medium: gouache on paper.

This gouache series is comprised of 3 subsets following slightly different themes. Each uses a simple composition of a grid of spheres or heads to explore themes like history, categorization, and time.

“Graffiti” examines history by looking at the widest scope possible through the shallowest lens possible. Broad leaps in time connect unusual moments in the past to create a view of our place in history that is sometimes dumb, often unexpected, but always true (at least as much as the data allows).

“History of Painting” is focused on describing and playing with the concept of the 17th-Century hierarchy of painting genres (still life, animal painting, landscape, genre painting, portrait, and history painting). Each piece is meant to strip the individual genre down to its elements. The “History Painting” acts as a bridge to the Graffiti series.

“140 Generations of People and They’re All Laughing” is the first in the “Ancestry” sub-series, which is a work in progress. It started with the question of what it would feel like to look into 140 generations through history all condensed into one composition. What do we have in common with them, and how does that frame how we see our place in the world today?

Early gouache pieces on chipboard including “book” projects like “Fears & Dangerous Things,” (an alphabet book), “Book Covers” (a set of 40+ dumb book covers), and miscellaneous older work.