This piece came from an estate sale in Pensacola, Florida, during the late 90s. It was a beautiful house right on the bay, and had been owned by an artist since the 40s. I’d seen pictures of the interior from a realtor friend of mine, and spotted some pieces that I really wanted. At the time, I was in grad school in Chicago, so I asked my then-girlfriend, who still lived in Pensacola, to go to the sale in my place and buy the pieces that I had seen in the photos. I also told her to buy anything else that was cool, because I trusted her eye. When I came back home and saw this enamel triptych, I was excited and started researching it immediately. Well, that research ended only a month or so ago while preparing pieces for this auction. I was retracing my steps and stumbled upon a photo that I had never “clicked” on before, and there, in Google’s suggested images, was a photo of a nearly identically-framed piece with the same type of enamel work. The feeling was priceless, and is the exact thing that design nerds like me live for.
If asked to select one word to describe Patrick, I would resist and pick two. The first would be curiosity — a fundamental essential, to stimulate inquiry and rigour in all things, both great and small, of any era or region, type or surface. Even the most fleeting survey of this selection for sale is a celebration of innovation and of inspiration — an unerring eye for the unusually exceptional, or perhaps the exceptionally unusual. The chances are, that these are indeed discoveries that you have not yet realised that you needed to make.
Mentor, would be my second word. If artefacts and objects articulate visual, cultural and historic language, then the fluency of skillful mentorship — to guide, nurture, describe and explain — releases the eloquence of murmuring histories. In this capacity Patrick is that most earnest and sincere of excellent narrators. If ever I had friends, clients or colleagues visiting New York looking for unusual inspiration, there was always the certainty that Patrick’s venues would offer them a glimpse of the hitherto unseen or the unusually seductive, always with the reassurance of the most fascinating story waiting to be told.
Mentorship and curiosity, when balanced in equal measure, reveal the precious alchemy of a curator. And it is the duty of the mature curator to discern and detect, to cultivate change, and from there to pioneer, and to share. Innovation is never static, and the Present is already the Future. Fresh dialogs evolve, energies to be nurtured, opportunities to be guided. Renewed and re-orientated, Patrick’s decision to exchange his bricks-and-mortar Tribeca gallery for a new interactive Brooklyn space aligns him towards a new inquisitive future as supportive benefactor, interlocutor and mentor to a fresh yield of talented creators — those established and those rising — and the quest for discovery rejuvenates.
— Simon Andrews
andrewsartadvisory.com
