In Dialogue With the Past with Micha Patiniott

Micha Patiniott can find the sensuality in a contorted body just as easily as he finds it in the movement of planets.

His dreamlike minimalist paintings are united by “this sensual wave,” he says, be it in the pink, hazy image of a man’s thigh or the sharply rendered crinkled edges of a scrap of paper. These paintings, which he created during his visual arts fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center this winter, will be featured in a two-week exhibition at FAWC starting March 8, titled “Rapture, Rupture, Suture, and Future!”

Patiniott lives in the Netherlands, where he grew up and spent his whole childhood drawing. He always loved art but assumed that a career as a painter was just not practical. “I had this idea of, OK, I love this,” he says, “but you cannot make a living by it.” It was only with his parents’ encouragement, he says, that he transitioned from computer science to art.