Jon Pestoni at Real Fine Arts gallery

Jon Pestoni’s paintings each layer several compositional orders and methodologies—geometric forms, figuration, graphic art, and Abstract Expressionism—such that they become inextricable and perhaps even contradict one another. The resulting work might accommodate such various marks as drips, splatters, thickly applied paint, and dry brush strokes, all in varying degrees of transparency. Pestoni’s works not only engage with the tradition and conventions of painting, but also with the idea of an artist’s unique hand, and the thin boundaries between failure and completion. “I don’t necessarily know how to finish a painting except by repeatedly trying to,” Pestoni has said. “I try to introduce problems into my practice.”